IBM unveiled Few days ago the availability of a new COBOL compiler for Linux x86 systems. Called "IBM COBOL for Linux x86", the arrival of this compiler shows for the umpteenth time that this language is far from dead.
The company believes that organizations that still have legacy systems with COBOL code they may need to upload their applications to a hybrid cloud, and even as COBOL continues to skew the statistics that predict its demise, many legacy systems still exist today in many organizations around the world, including banks and government agencies.
Its stability and efficiency and the high costs (and risks) of reprogramming, with more modern languages, processes that have been consolidated over time. Developers have to do their best to reprogram even the smallest changes, as is the case in some US states with their unemployment computer systems.
For example, Iowa, New Jersey, Kansas, and Oklahoma still have their unemployment systems written in the COBOL language. Aside from the high cost of reprogramming, developers often prefer to dedicate themselves to more modern languages, which explains the fact that programmers capable of working with older fonts are becoming increasingly rare.
These reasons explain why IBM, which is now actively working on modern technologies as the hybrid cloud and offers this new COBOL compiler.
"COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 is the latest addition to IBM's COBOL family of compilers, which includes Enterprise COBOL for z / OS and COBOL for AIX," IBM wrote in a blog post Tuesday describing the new compiler. According to the company, COBOL for Linux on x86 is a powerful and productive development environment for building and modernizing COBOL applications. Includes a COBOL optimization compiler and a COBOL runtime library. COBOL for Linux on x86 is based on the same advanced optimization technology as Enterprise COBOL for z / OS.
It is mentioned that offers both performance capabilities as a programming tool to develop mission-critical COBOL applications for Linux systems on x86.
Also, the other idea behind the compiler release is to empower organizations that still have COBOL-written applications to port them to a hybrid cloud. "COBOL for Linux on x86 is designed to help customers on their journey to the cloud by strategically deploying mission-critical applications written in COBOL in a hybrid cloud environment," IBM explained.
This can mean a combination of z / OS, AIX, mainframes, and Power Systems. In fact, the COBOL workshops were promised that minimal customization efforts and lead times are required to strategically deploy COBOL / CICS applications developed for z / OS on Linux in x86 and cloud environments.
The new offering accomplishes this by linking to DB2 and the IBM Customer Information Control System so that Linux applications using x86 can interact with older COBOL applications.
Also it is mentioned that native XML support was also integrated to promote interoperability and created a conversion utility that can migrate COBOL source code developed with non-IBM COBOL compilers.
But the announcement also suggests that IBM does not fully believe that there is a future for this tool, as it concludes:
"This solution also gives enterprises the ability to move workloads to IBM Z if business logic and data performance and performance requirements are met with CICS Transaction Server for z / OS."
Finally, it is mentioned that any x86-64 server with any of the following distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 (or higher) or Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS or higher, can be capable of running the new IBM compiler.
IBM estimates that the COBOL compiler for Linux will be available by next week "April 16, 2021." If you want to know more about the note, you can check the details In the following link.