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There are millions and millions of lines of old COBOL code. I’m surprised there isn’t a commercial “pluggable” transpiler product. Read in COBOL, output Java, R

There are millions and millions of lines of old COBOL code. I’m surprised there isn’t a commercial “pluggable” transpiler product. Read in COBOL, output Java, Rust, Go… Many COBOL systems also have a lot of intelligence in the job stream order, and dependencies - so that needs to be converted too. This seems like a no-brainer to build a consulting practice and tools around. Oh, and the data has to be converted too.

lhoff 1y ago
That exists. There are multiple vendors that have solutions to automatically transform COBOL code. Deloitte, for example, has quite a big practice around Mainframe modernization with a toolsuite https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/topics/application-modernization-platform.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/topics/appl... And AWS bought a company with such a toolsuite and offers it now as a service https://aws.amazon.com/de/mainframe-modernization/capabilities/refactor/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/mainframe-modernization/capabiliti...
mdaniel 1y ago
gnu-cobol is likely what you're after (cloudflare even used it to demo their Worker platform) but my experience has been that the language isn't the nonsense it's the environmental that's horrific to port Consider a hypothetical Python example: import os os.system("DIRECTORY ./SHELVED_STATE") if you ported the python to C# it wouldn't suddenly work on Windows or Linux
- rbanffy 1y ago
  Mainframe OSs are fun to learn precisely because they are profoundly alien to users of modern computers. You don’t even need to go the mainframe route - installing OpenVMS on an x86 machine already gives you an environment full of mysteries to be explored.