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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

I think it mostly stems from IBM compiler optimizations for their mainframes (which is most of today's COBOL), and not the language itself.

I do COBOL mostly in OpenVMS and only tinker with IBM in the weekends but it would be cool to see how it performs under the same circumstances compared to other languages.

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You surely know more about COBOL than I do, but what about decimal arithmetic? I mean if the problem domain requires arithmetic correctly rounded to thousandths, with the operands loaded from fixed text fields and the results stored in fixed text fields, COBOL gives you that directly in the language, and presumably on a relatively efficient form. I don't know if using instructions like 8086 DAA and AAA is a win on today's CPUs, but surely avoiding the sequence of long divisions to convert from binary to decimal is a win (if what you're doing between input and output is, like, an addition and a multiplication by 1.0575, or something). Are you thinking that maybe some C++ template Decimal class with some integer parameters is going to beat GnuCOBOL on an amd64?

I wish I could give you a good answer, but I really haven't dug deep into the pros of the language. If you see any review of this I'd love to read it as well.

Your day job, in 2019, is COBOL on OpenVMS? really? Tell me more. Is this new code? Are you using new hardware? Do you want my old alpha?

Been doing this for just over a year and mostly been doing new development where the need has just asrisen.

We run Itanium (exciting that the first OpenVMS X86 boot was recently) and when/if I can afford a house it's going to have plenty of hard toys!

Shameless plug for r/homelab- if you're interested in doing server stuff at home, they're a great community to be a part of.

I've been able to get the same or very similar performance with modern languages that are a lot easier to debug. It just a matter of developers and management letting go of the old ways.

And the company willing to fork out ??? to migrate.

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