3 ms·

It sounds like you are referring to AS/400 and successors (common mistake, no biggie) rather than the mainframes being referred to here that are successors of S

It sounds like you are referring to AS/400 and successors (common mistake, no biggie) rather than the mainframes being referred to here that are successors of System 360 and use the Telum chips (as far as I am aware they have never been based on POWER, like IBM i and AIX and the rest of the AS/400 heritage). RPG was never a big thing on mainframes for instance. I've never come across it in about 10 years of working on them professionally. Same with NEWP, I've never heard of it. And Java is pretty important on the platform these days and not an attempt from the past. It's been pushed pretty hard for at least 20 years and is kept well up to date with newer Java standards. Additionally, the Unix on z/OS is not like WSL. There is no virtualization. The POSIX APIs are implemented as privileged system services with Program Calls (kind of like supervisor calls/system calls). It's more akin to a "flavor" kinda like old school Windows and OS/2 than the modern WSL. You can interface with the system in the old school MVS flavor and use those APIs, or use the POSIX APIs, and they are meant to work together (for instance, the TCPIP stack and web servers on the platform are implemented with the POSIX APIs, for obvious compatibility and porting reasons). Of course, you can run Linux on mainframes and that is big too, but usually when people refer to mainframe Unix they are talking about how z/OS is technically a Unix, which I don't think it would count in the same way if it was just running a Unix environment under a virtualization layer. Windows can do that and it's not a Unix.

sillywalk 1y ago
Nitpick: Almost 20 years ago IBM had the eclipz project to share technology between its POWER (System i and System P) and Mainframe (System Z) servers. I'm not sure if counts as "based on", but "the z10 processor was co-developed with and shares many design traits with the POWER6 processor, such as fabrication technology, logic design, execution unit, floating-point units, bus technology (GX bus) and pipeline design style."[0] The chips were otherwise quite different, and obviously don't share the same ISA. I also don't know if IBM has kept this kind of sharing between POWER & Z. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10
- rbanffy 1y ago
  They must share some similarities - it's IBM and both POWER and Z have access to the same patents and R&D. Apart from that, they are very different chips, for very different markets. Also, I'm sure there are many little POWER-like cores inside a z17 doing things like pushing data around. A major disappointment is that the hardware management elements are x86 machines, probably the only x86 machines IBM still sells.
pjmlp 1y ago
The question was, > What languages are people still writing mainframe code in? so I naturally answered with the ones I know about. > RPG was never a big thing on mainframes for instance. It certainly was in Portugal, back in its heyday. > Same with NEWP, I've never heard of it. Systems programming language for Burroughs B5000, evolution from ESPOL its original one, nowadays sold a Unisys MCP. > And Java is pretty important on the platform these days and not an attempt from the past. It's been pushed pretty hard for at least 20 years and is kept well up to date with newer Java standards. The attempt from the past was converting JVM bytecodes to TIMI on the fly, this approach was dropped in favour of the regular JIT. For the rest regarding "like WSL", I was trying to simplify, not giving an conference talk on UNIX support across micro and mainframes, and its evolution.

sillywalk 1y ago

Nitpick: Almost 20 years ago IBM had the eclipz project to share technology between its POWER (System i and System P) and Mainframe (System Z) servers. I'm not sure if counts as "based on", but "the z10 processor was co-developed with and shares many design traits with the POWER6 processor, such as fabrication technology, logic design, execution unit, floating-point units, bus technology (GX bus) and pipeline design style."[0] The chips were otherwise quite different, and obviously don't share the same ISA. I also don't know if IBM has kept this kind of sharing between POWER & Z. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10

rbanffy 1y ago
They must share some similarities - it's IBM and both POWER and Z have access to the same patents and R&D. Apart from that, they are very different chips, for very different markets. Also, I'm sure there are many little POWER-like cores inside a z17 doing things like pushing data around. A major disappointment is that the hardware management elements are x86 machines, probably the only x86 machines IBM still sells.

pjmlp 1y ago

The question was, > What languages are people still writing mainframe code in? so I naturally answered with the ones I know about. > RPG was never a big thing on mainframes for instance. It certainly was in Portugal, back in its heyday. > Same with NEWP, I've never heard of it. Systems programming language for Burroughs B5000, evolution from ESPOL its original one, nowadays sold a Unisys MCP. > And Java is pretty important on the platform these days and not an attempt from the past. It's been pushed pretty hard for at least 20 years and is kept well up to date with newer Java standards. The attempt from the past was converting JVM bytecodes to TIMI on the fly, this approach was dropped in favour of the regular JIT. For the rest regarding "like WSL", I was trying to simplify, not giving an conference talk on UNIX support across micro and mainframes, and its evolution.