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I am interested in this topic but never quite understood it. Is there a techincal reason why these organizations don't transpile COBOL to C? I imagine building such a compiler wouldn't be that hard, and even if it is, we've had decades to work on it.

Is it more of a process thing (having to change unit tests, code review, hire new people, etc) that prevents this? Or is it just too risky given the important roles of the mainframes?

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Methinks you are replying to the wrong comment? But for the fun of it, the large three letter mainframe company made an effort to rewrite their COBOL compiler's backend to use the same JIT compiler they have for Java (check slides 5 and 8): https://www.slideshare.net/MarkStoodley/under-the-hood-of-th...

Such a change would be transparent to the end user.. Except for gotchas like not all users have the source code for all of their dependencies. What happens if you want to update your program and you have a dependency on a binary from some vendor who went defunct 35 years ago? You're stuck compiling against whatever artifacts you have so does transpiling to C still work?

Yes, wrong comment, sorry! Thanks for the link, it was interesting

Wrong comment?

Yes, how embarrassing

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