News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler... by danielmarkbruce on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:44PM (#34408560)
Modernization projects move COBOL code running on mainframes to COBOL code running on the jvm or .net, on x86 machines, using all kinds of libraries emulating services provided by the mainframe OS/environment. It's pretty amazing really.
Re:Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler... by derefr on Monday January 16, 2023 @10:09PM (#34408709)
> using all kinds of libraries emulating services provided by the mainframe OS/environment

Can you give an example of "services provided by the mainframe OS/environment" that could be practically/scalably emulated on a microcomputer architecture using library shims? Because those honestly sound like the sorts of things one might want to use even for non-legacy purposes :)

Re:Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open source COBOL compiler... by danielmarkbruce on Monday January 16, 2023 @11:42PM (#34409231)
A database. To be clear though, it's usually a library plus a service. It could be library + sqlite etc though I guess. Look here for example, page 8:

https://aws-quickstart.s3.amazonaws.com/quickstart-microfocu...

It's pretty amazing, big companies make these migrations on important systems. There are 10's (or 100's maybe) of billions of lines of COBOL still being deployed and companies move them into a cloud (ie aws etc, x86 + cloud services) environment for various purposes.