The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

Re:The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java by e12e on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:05AM (#16382374)

> Ship of Theseus replacement

This why java seems an odd choice; I can't imagine trying to run a codebase that's a split between assembly and java (keeping behaviour the same as more and more code is shifted).

The best idea I can see for that, is start with an interpreter for the assembler in java, moving procedure calls "up" into java.

But I imagine getting the interpreter good enough to run the same as the original target machine would be a huge task in itself.

[ed: leveraging clojure on the first iteration(s) might actually make the project feasible, though...]

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java by sterlind on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:50AM (#16382874)

ha, this is clever!

I imagine you might get the interpreter running up to spec by flipping actual mainframe to debug, then writing a supervisor at the interpreter's side that checks for parity at each instruction, then single-steps the physical machine.

[ Parent | on HN ]