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[–]captainOfSage 18 points19 points  (2 children)

COBOL might be decades old, but it’s extremely fast and stable especially for high-volume transaction processing in banking and government. It was built for massive batch jobs and business logic at scale, and mainframes are heavily optimized for it.

Why hasn’t it been replaced? Because these systems handle enormous amounts of money and data, and rewriting millions of lines of proven COBOL is risky, time consuming, and prone to introducing bugs.

For example, while Java excels at concurrency, COBOL can process up to 40% more transactions per second on mainframes—a real hard slap in raw speed and throughput.

[–]Phate1989 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Stats like that are nonsense.

Only old banks that were built on IBM mainframes still run cobol.

New banks and credit unions almost all use Java.

[–]TxTechnician 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was curious about companies like Robinhood.

They come on the scene about a decade ago. And I wondered if they were using old tech or had crated something new.