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I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.
by _w1tm 2y ago
I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.
- ang_cire 2y agoThey absolutely are. Modern COBOL (even 25 year old COBOL) isn't running on ancient System360/370/390s or something, it's running on modern z/OS mainframes.
- cwbriscoe 2y agoYup, Z/OS even has an AIX subsystem these days. I have had to use it for some java decryption software and to use it to do some ebcdic to ascii conversion.
- p_l 2y agoThey are patched up regularly. The COBOL code itself maybe not, but the runtimes?
- cwbriscoe 2y agoYou are correct, the OS is patched regularly but that doesn't require a recompile for the COBOL code, the OS ABI is stable and unchanging for legacy code. I have programs still running that hasn't been recompiled since 2005 (maybe earlier that is just what I noticed recently). When they upgrade hardware, they can do it per LPAR. They just shift the workloads over to other LPARS while they are upgrading another. Pretty much zero downtime.
- p_l 2y agoYep. CICS, IMS, etc. all get updates along with z/OS itself, yet I had once plugged in an user exit written and compiled before 64bit z/OS existed and it just worked.