OCamlPro is currently working on Cobol-related projects: they help companies migrate their COBOL applications away from legacy mainframe environments. As part of this venture, they contribute to GnuCOBOL, but they also released some modern tooling for working with COBOL codebases.
I’m curious if people are actually using GNU COBOL. Pretty much all of the COBOL I hear people talk about is on z (edit: and that implies things like Db2, CICS, etc. - it’s not just COBOL, but the ecosystem). At least in my world (i) COBOL is a bit of a thing, but massively dwarfed by RPG.
I wonder how they’re handling the everything else around the machine. Business logic in COBOL is one thing, but the transaction engine (that your code usually runs within the context of), database (so DB migration plus probably rewriting vendor specific SQL), and frontends like 3270/web stuff is just as important. I’m not familiar enough with GCOS to compare with z on that front though.
There are some weird corners of the world outside mainframes where COBOL can be found: My wife used to be a software developer for an Oracle PeopleSoft installation, and she would moan whenever some bug led her to dig deep enough into the guts of PeopleSoft that she found herself reading COBOL.
OCamlPro is currently working on Cobol-related projects: they help companies migrate their COBOL applications away from legacy mainframe environments. As part of this venture, they contribute to GnuCOBOL, but they also released some modern tooling for working with COBOL codebases.
I’m curious if people are actually using GNU COBOL. Pretty much all of the COBOL I hear people talk about is on z (edit: and that implies things like Db2, CICS, etc. - it’s not just COBOL, but the ecosystem). At least in my world (i) COBOL is a bit of a thing, but massively dwarfed by RPG.
This LinkedIn post from OCamlPro (in French: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/get-superbol-france_gnucobol-cobol-mainframe-activity-7122607267480260610-Lfa0) seems to imply that the French government would migrate from GCOS Cobol environment to Gnu COBOL.
I wonder how they’re handling the everything else around the machine. Business logic in COBOL is one thing, but the transaction engine (that your code usually runs within the context of), database (so DB migration plus probably rewriting vendor specific SQL), and frontends like 3270/web stuff is just as important. I’m not familiar enough with GCOS to compare with z on that front though.
There are some weird corners of the world outside mainframes where COBOL can be found: My wife used to be a software developer for an Oracle PeopleSoft installation, and she would moan whenever some bug led her to dig deep enough into the guts of PeopleSoft that she found herself reading COBOL.