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by Roland Koo, Product Manager, Compilers, IBM
Enterprise COBOL Developer Trial for z/OS V5.1
On April 23, 2013, IBM announced Enterprise COBOL for z/OS v5.1. This compiler GA’d on June 21, 2013.
Enterprise COBOL V5.1 is rearchitected to include advanced technology for optimizing COBOL applications to fully use z/Architecture, including the new zBC12 processor. With modern advanced optimization and improved exploitation of z hardware, many well-structured, CPU-intensive batch applications have shown performance increases greater than 10%. This enables customers to shorten the processing time of their business critical applications and reduce operating cost. Enterprise COBOL V5.1 also supports the new z/OS V2.1 operating environment.
To enable customers to assess the value that could be gained from upgrading to Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1, IBM is announcing a Developer Trial. This product is scheduled to GA on Oct 4, 2013. Customers are able to take advantage of a zero charge, 90 days evaluation license to develop a comprehensive upgrade plan before they have to make an investment. Enterprise COBOL Developer Trial does not initiate single version charge (SVC) and offers the same functionalities as the Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 product. The only difference is code that is compiled with the Developer Trial cannot be used for production.
Enterprise COBOL Developer Trial for z/OS V5.1 is available as a standard offering from IBM through ShopzSeries. You can contact your IBM representative for assistance in ordering the COBOL Developer Trial.
Enterprise PL/I for z/OS V4.4
PL/I is a general-purpose programming language that was first introduced in the 1960’s. It is used in many scientific, engineering, and business applications. Today, PL/I is still running many business-critical applications in the world. IBM delivered a new release of the PL/I compiler every year since 1999 on System z. The announcement of Enterprise PL/I for z/OS V4.4 kept this streak alive.
Enterprise PL/I for z/OS consistently delivered innovations to help developers maintain and create applications that are optimized for deployment on IBM System z servers. Like COBOL, PL/I also focuses on delivering new features to improve performance, productivity, and modernization of proven, business critical applications.
Enterprise PL/I for z/OS V4.4 fully uses System z architecture, including the latest zEC12 and zBC12 servers. With this latest release, you can take advantage of new optimization features to improve application performance and reduce operating cost. You will also notice a 4X improvement in listing generation time, and improved program diagnostics especially for programs that work with SQL. If you are an IMS user, you will be able to take advantage of new features to improve performance (for example, Sparse arrays, XML cleaning, and normalization; base 64 encoding and decoding). The size of the IMS converter has been reduced, allowing more converters to run in the same addressing space.
Enterprise PL/I for z/OS V4.4 is scheduled to GA on Sept. 6, 2013.
z/OS V2.1 XL C/C++
z/OS V2.1 XL C/C++ is an optional priced feature of the z/OS V2.1. You can develop high-performing business applications and system programs on z/OS. It can fully use System z architectures, including the latest IBM zEC12 and zBC12 servers.
z/OS V2.1 XL C/C++ provides significant performance improvements over z/OS V1.13 XL C/C++. Performance of compute-intensive integer benchmarks improved 6% (31 bit); and 11% (64-bit); compute-intensive floating-point benchmarks improved 1% (31 bit); 4% (64-bit).
This new compiler introduced new support for OpenMP API V3.1 specifications to enable development of parallel applications to take advantage of multi-core architecture. It also improved capabilities for porting C and C++ applications to IBM System z servers. It added support for a number of new language features in C11 and C++ 11 standards; and GNU C/C++ language extensions.
z/OS v2.1 XL C/C++ also improved system programming capabilities with the “METAL C” option, which is designed to simplify system program development on z/OS. It allows developers to use C syntax in place of High Level assembly language (HLASM) to develop system programs. Programs that are written in Metal C can easily be moved to new System z architectures by recompiling and using advanced optimization technology in z/OS XL C/C++ to optimize the code for the target system. This significantly reduces development cost and delivery time.
z/OS v2.1 XL C/C++ allows developers to debug optimized code. Developers can now use Debug tool to debug optimized production code that is written in C and C++. This product is scheduled to GA with z/OS v2.1 on Sept. 30, 2013.
