20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

The vast majority of COBOL in production runs on IBM mainframes in conjunction with JCL (Job Control Language). If you are looking to offload COBOL from a mainframe to a cheaper platform JCL is a must. I love that this project exists but it’s only one half of a solution to migration off of a mainframe.

Re: 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

#6

Post by NikolaNovak » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

>>Get those punch cards back out!

I get that's (probably!) a joke, but it misrepresents COBOL as something completely stuck in the 70s. And, y'know, it isn't exactly the fanciest language in the world, but we still have several programmers on our project and they're spitting out new code every day of their life, no punchcards:).

(And it's not on a mainframe either - it's running primarily on AIX, with some of Windows and Linux).

Re: 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

#7

Post by rhaps0dy » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

> the past three years, it has received attention from 13 contributors with 460 commits.

That doesn’t sound like very many commits. Pretty mature!

Re: 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

#8

Post by macintux » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

fredsmith219 wrote: post #5

The vast majority of COBOL in production runs on IBM mainframes in conjunction with JCL (Job Control Language). If you are looking to offload COBOL from a mainframe to a cheaper platform JCL is a must. I love that this project exists but it’s only one half of a solution to migration off of a mainframe.

I’m unfamiliar with JCL, but from a quick search it sounds like most scripts don’t use much of the language. Still, I’d bet that most of the JCL functionality is used if you look at a decent-sized collection of scripts.

How much of the full JCL do you think would be necessary to reimplement in order to get, say, 30% of the existing scripts to work?

Re: 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

#9

Post by foobarian » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

proneb1rd wrote: post #3

Very exotic. Does it support multi threading? What kind of things can be done with it?

I'm guessing it does money math in a certain way vetted by this field that would be very difficult to recertify on some replacement.

Re: 20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry

#10

Post by airstrike » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #6

>>Get those punch cards back out! I get that's (probably!) a joke, but it misrepresents COBOL as something completely stuck in the 70s. And, y'know, it isn't exactly the fanciest language in the world, but we still have several programmers on our project and they're spitting out new code every day of their life, no punchcards:). (And it's not on a mainframe either - it's running primarily on AIX, with some of Windows…

Let us join hands in a moment of silent prayer for those unfortunate souls