[Info-vax] First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/16/2022 7:28 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/15/22 22:10, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 4/15/2022 7:25 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 4/15/2022 7:17 PM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>> On 15/04/2022 8:44 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>> On 4/15/2022 3:36 AM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>>>> Something like Kestrel that talks HTTP and can pass JSON to 3GL
>>>>>> code a la mode de TIER3. FIDO2 Authentication support.
>>>>>
>>>>> Both Java and Python can provide nice embedded HTTP servers, do 
>>>>> JSON and
>>>>> potentially interact with native code (Cobol or otherwise), but 
>>>>> obvious
>>>>> question is whether it wouldn't be better to do it all in either 
>>>>> Java or Python.
>>>>
>>>> This is the biggest mistake VMS has made for 20 years; throw away 
>>>> the existing
>>>> customer base :-(
>>>
>>> Using the right tool for the job is hardly throwing away the
>>> customer base.
>>>
>>> Cobol, Basic, Pascal, C etc. is just not the optimal language
>>> for writing a new web service.
>>>
>>> Not on any platform.
>>
>> Really depends on the web service, doesn't it?
> 
> Like maybe, IBM zSystem running COBOL with CICS and a DB2 backend.

I don't see that combo as special.

CGI scripts in Cobol or PL/I would require the developers
to write maybe 10 times as much code and the result would
perform really bad.

Java or Python frontend calling C wrapper calling Cobol
or PL/I code may be doable, but comes with a lot of risks
due to potentially incompatible threading/transactional/whatever
models.

Neither seems attractive to me.

Doing it all in Java is possible (Java on z works
with CICS and DB2). Maybe it is also possible to do
it all in Python (Python does support DB2 but I don't
know about CICS - and I would probably prefer Java over
Python for such code anyway).

If the use case allows for async updates then it would
be easy to have Java or Python read directly from DB2
but send all updates to IBM MQ and have some regular
Cobol or PL/I code handle the actual update (there are
most likely existing code there that can be reused).

Arne