over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

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zip accident
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over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by zip accident »

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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by tufty »

I'm sure that Mr Musk has vaguely heard someone talking about transpilers, and doesn't have any grasp of what is involved in moving a platform.
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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by gilesgoat »

tufty wrote:I'm sure that Mr Musk has vaguely heard someone talking about transpilers, and doesn't have any grasp of what is involved in moving a platform.
Java ? .. Isn't goint to be slower ??
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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by GoatFoam »

gilesgoat wrote:
tufty wrote:I'm sure that Mr Musk has vaguely heard someone talking about transpilers, and doesn't have any grasp of what is involved in moving a platform.
Java ? .. Isn't goint to be slower ??
It's complicated. JIT compiled languages like java can give decent performance if they are used well, but the way most people are taught to program isn't conducive to high performance results.

I wouldn't expect automatically converted code to be particularly efficient though. All the idioms would be wrong for the target language so I wouldn't expect it to be legible either.

The whole thing seems like tech bro wishful thinking to me, as usual.
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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by skab »

GoatFoam wrote:It's complicated. JIT compiled languages like java can give decent performance if they are used well, but the way most people are taught to program isn't conducive to high performance results.

I wouldn't expect automatically converted code to be particularly efficient though. All the idioms would be wrong for the target language so I wouldn't expect it to be legible either.

The whole thing seems like tech bro wishful thinking to me, as usual.
Amen!

Especially the "isn't conducive to high performance results" part, hardware gets faster and faster, yet software feels slower and slower, meaning that it actually performs extraordinarily badly. And all because programmers get lazy and still have to meet even shorter deadlines. What's a couple frameworks wasting half a Gig between friends...?

I can't remember what project it was, but they ported that thing from Zig (a quite fast C variant) to Rust using AI, and all that for licence reasons, Zig forbids some crap that they were doing, so they had to swap. Made it in record time due to AI. No idea how good the code was or how readable, but at least both languages are C-style and quite close relatives, that probably worked out fine.

But COBOL to Java? And why the hell Java? All I think about when I hear "Java" is startup time of programs, oh excuse me, "Apps" of two minutes and up and clunky UIs. Actually nothing language-specific, more Java-programmer-specific. Not a fan, of both. But since we're talking about Elon's DOGE stooges, that tracks.

But anyway, an old language like that ported to an explicitly OOP language is not a great fit. You could probably transcode it easily, but that new source is probably just COBOL code expressed with Java keywords and syntax. Utterly unreadable, I guess.
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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by skab »

Also:

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-great-so ... y-collapse

That post should be printed out and hung on every developer's and their managers' walls!
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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by moosedude »

skab wrote:Also:

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-great-so ... y-collapse

That post should be printed out and hung on every developer's and their managers' walls!
Interesting article.

I would add that not only are junior devs. not coming through the pipeline, the recent developers who are now "seniors" in the last 10 years don't know what a memory leak is nor how to fix it.

confidence in languages with automatic garbage collection is higher than the reality demands.

The exposure to programming languages & frameworks where you'd have to manage your own memory allocations just isn't there anymore to teach them what's going on with system memory for them to have enough experience to fix it.

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Re: over 60 million lines of COBOL -> ?Java? in months

Post by GoatFoam »

I did work with a new grad a few years ago who *did* know that stuff, but I got the impression that it was an optional module.

I don't have a problem with managed languages for most things. I don't tend to use them much but that's as much a matter of circumstances than preference.

The problem is that on the occasions when you do have to understand memory management then nothing else will do. A good example of the kind of thing is managing GPU resources - you generally need a garbage collector when things get complex. Aren't you lucky! The API doesn't have one.

My all time favourite language for screwing around in is probably still Erlang. Not a manual allocation in sight.
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