On 28.02.2023 20:55, David Crayford wrote:
I respectfully express my opinion without intending to badmouth anyone. I believe that benchmarking the performance of reading a large file is not an artificial test but rather a real-world use case that we encounter regularly. It is no secret that REXX on z/OS can be slow. In fact, one of my colleagues who worked on the IBM File Manager product, which incorporates REXX scripting, developed their own subset of REXX because the performance of the TSO REXX interpreter did not meet their objectives.
If that is the case then it shows that IBM needs to maintain their mainframe REXX by replacing it with an up-to-date version of REXX (finally).
ooRexx would be a candidate as extending it with external function packages and Rexx command handlers can be done with C++ and Java. ooRexx was developed by IBM and has been put into open-source by the Rexx Language [1] association after having received the source code by IBM for that purpose.
Besides allowing the REXX coding knowledge to be used/applied immediately, a lot of benefitial abilities would become available at a finger tip, including among other things the ability to quickly create datastructures (classes) with attributes and routines if needed and gaining an incredible flexibility (to ease coding problems) with the incorporated message paradigm making it a natural language for any message/queue based infrastructures.
Of course, such a port needs to be done by knowledgeable and professional people who have no hidden agenda to make it (or any other interpreted language) look bad, au contraire, having the motivation to get the best possible port for mainframes and thereby for REXX programmers on the mainframe.
As ooRexx is CMake based this should be quite feasible for such a huge computer company (having so many excellently skilled employees) like IBM.
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