Enterprise Linux Today: SAS Institute Brings S/390 Cross Compilers to Linux

“The SAS Institute has announced the availability, in the first
quarter of 2001, of Version 7.0 of their SAS/C and SAS/C++
cross-platform compilers for Linux development hosts. These tools
allow IBM mainframe applications, targeted for OS/390 or VM/ESA, to
be created and compiled on non- mainframe development hosts.
Previous versions of SAS/C and SAS/C++ have supported AIX, Solaris,
NT, and HP-UX as development platforms. Version 7.0 drops HP-UX but
adds support for Intel Linux. (HP-UX is still supported for
previous versions.) Gary T. Ciampa, Product Manager for the
compiler team at SAS Institute, says that other Linux ports may be
in the works, depending on customer demand. The company is
seriously considering a port to Linux on S/390. Says Ciampa, “We
anticipate Linux/390 as a natural migration path for our
development community.”

“According to Ciampa, cross compilation is often better for
S/390 C/C++ development than a native environment because it
“allows developers who may not be that familiar with the mainframe
environment to develop and build applications in the familiar Linux
framework that are targeted for the S/390 environment.” In fact,
the compilers can easily be integrated into the standard Linux
framework using tools like lexx, yacc, and make. Ciampa says that
many of SAS Institute’s Linux customers are companies that are
scaling up UNIX and Linux applications to the mainframe, and that
developers don’t want to have to learn a new tool set.”

“During the build process, the early stages of compilation and
linking are performed entirely on the development host. Only when
it is time to link against mainframe load modules, or to mark the
final binary as being executable, must the process move to the
mainframe hardware. This, says Ciampa, can save time and money for
the developer. “Compilation speed is almost instantaneous, whereas
in the mainframe environment you’re traditionally batch oriented.
We’ve seen some customers go from ten hours to under thirty minutes
to rebuild an entire [large] application.” For the late stages,
remote execution protocols such as rexec and FTP can eliminate the
need to logon to the mainframe at all. Mainframes running IBM’s
OS/390 operating system support a special FTP command set that
sends the uploaded data stream into the system’s batch queue
instead of to a regular data file, using the Job Entry Subsystem
(JES) facility that has existed since the days of Hollerith cards.
It’s a proven, reliable, and secure way to trigger jobs remotely,
because it can be set up so that the actual code isn’t uploaded,
but rather a simple trigger that causes a pre-defined job to be
started.”

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