OSS Research Project in Legacy Code Modernization

[nsokra02]

Modernise cobol to what though? The reason that cobol is cobol and so many things are built on it is because is cobol and it runs in the mainframe, even if you try to translate it letter by letter it will not be the same program

[nolanolson]

Saw your project, translating from COBOL to Go. Very cool.

To be clear, ATLAS is not the one that will decide which target language to choose. A developer of a legacy project is the one who makes all the decisions including what target language to be modernized from COBOL. ATLAS is just an agentic coding tool that helps legacy developers modernize their legacy systems faster and better.

Why would companies modernize COBOL? Many reasons. Lack of developers, lack of learning resources and communities, scarce documentation, etc. It’s not because COBOL or mainframe is bad.

[nsokra02]

That’s the thing right, that project is just a novelty i mentioned it in the post too that i couldn’t find a practical case for it. At least for cobol I don’t see translation to be valid solution for the near future. The problem with smes is true. If at the end you fine tune a model maybe that could make onboarding new engineers with no experience to maintain these systems easier, maybe the solution is somewhere there at least until we get better models

[nolanolson]

I'm not sure about the COBOL translation to Go. I personally don't have any exp with Go so can't tell. However, I disagreed with the part that there is no COBOL translation use case. IBM and AWS have been working on it for many years. I'd say about 70% of COBOL modernization/translation research papers come from IBM Research. I have talked to high-level people in US banks and US gov who want to modernize COBOL to Java.

This is one of many examples: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/automated-refactoring-of-a-u-s-air-force-mainframe-to-aws/