Today, IBM announced an innovative platform, IBM z16, to help clients accelerate digital transformation and unlock new opportunities. In addition to delivering Decision Velocity to help businesses make optimal decision rapidly, and Quantum-Safe system to improve cyber resilience, IBM z16 also delivers new and improved cloud capabilities to help clients modernize with Hybrid Cloud.
At the same time, IBM also announced a suite of Compiler products that fully supports IBM z16 architecture to optimize application performance and provide new features to help clients modernize their business-critical applications to propel their digital transformation plans.
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS (COBOL) 6.4 and Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS (ABO) 2.2
COBOL and ABO are designed to be complementary to each other. ABO is IBM’s unique optimization technology for COBOL applications. It increases performance of COBOL applications without the need recompiling the source code. As a result, clients can use COBOL 6.4 for application development and ABO 2.2 to quicky increase performance with minimal testing effort.
COBOL 6.4 simplifies programming for COBOL programs to interoperate with Java 8 and Java 11 programs, supports interoperability between AMODE 31 (31-bit) and AMODE 64 (64-bit) COBOL and Java programs, and added support for user defined functions. Clients can use these new features to extend capabilities to unlock the value of existing applications for digital transformation.
ABO 2.2 fully supports new hardware features in IBM z16 designed to improve the performance of COBOL workloads. It optimizes binaries compiled with VS COBOL II 1.3 to COBOL 6.4. It also includes ABO Assistant, which contains a set of tools designed to accelerate evaluation and deployment of ABO by eliminating the manual and time-consuming tasks of optimizing batch and online COBOL (or CICS/COBOL) applications.
IBM Enterprise PL/I for z/OS (PL/I) 6.1
PL/I have a long history of supporting business critical applications. PL/I 6.1 allows interoperability between 31-bit and 64-bit applications. It fully supports IBM z16 architecture, providing optimal performance of PL/I workload on the platform. PL/I 6.1 comes with new application modernization features such as improved usage of JSON with additional support for EBCDIC JSON.
IBM Open XL C/C++ 1.1 for z/OS
In August 2020, IBM announced the intention to adopt open source LLVM infrastructure for all IBM C/C++ offerings, while contributing code to the LLVM community. IBM will also continue to develop new optimization technology to deliver optimal performance of C/C++ applications on IBM zSystems. IBM Open XL C/C++ 1.1 for z/OS (Open XL C/C++) is the first C and C++ compiler delivered on IBM zSystems that is based on LLVM.
Open XL C/C++ 1.1 is a 64-bit only C and C++ compiler which fully supports IBM z16 architecture and runs on z/OS Unix. It supports C17 and C++17 language features. Open XL C/C++ is a web deliverable that is available to z/OS XL C/C++ clients at no extra charge.
IBM SDK Java Technology Edition 8, and IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition 11
The latest releases of IBM SDK Java Technology Edition 8, and IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition 11, for Linux on IBM Z and z/OS will support and exploit IBM z16. Powered by Eclipse OpenJ9 technology, the Java Virtual Machine detects the underlying hardware and optimizes existing Java application code with transparent exploitation of the new IBM z16 hardware instructions. IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition for z/OS is a new, high-performance 64-bit Java runtime and development kit on z/OS. It supports the new Java 11 language features and includes the OpenJDK Java 11 class libraries and the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM. Customers on IBM zSystems can now develop Java applications using Java 11.
IBM continues to deliver new and improved cloud capabilities on the platform. The goal is to empower developers by adopting broad open and industry standard tools and an agile DevOps methodology to accelerate modernization. In January 2022, IBM announced IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack which provides a flexible and integrated platform to support z/OS based cloud native development, application, and data modernization and infrastructure automation. Included as fundamental components are IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python, IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Node.js, IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Go and IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition for z/OS.
IBM zSystems can play a critical role in your digital transformation journey with unmatched reliability, security, and resiliency. With the addition of these new programming languages on z/OS, you can now take advantage of the enormously popular and fast-growing languages to develop new applications or extend capabilities of existing business-critical applications on IBM zSystems to accelerate application modernization.
For more information on these new announcements, please visit the following product pages
IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS
IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS
IBM Enterprise PL/I for z/OS
IBM Open XL C/C++ 1.1 for z/OS
IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition for z/OS
IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack