CodeTurn COBOL to C#

Astadia COBOL to C# Solution

Many of today’s applications that were developed in COBOL are still mission-critical and continue to deliver significant benefits to the organizations that use and rely upon them. Nevertheless, many organizations are faced with issues of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), skill shortage, or simply end of support of the technology that served them well for many decades.

Astadia's service provides an opportunity to liberate these valuable and reliable business systems from their dependency on compiler technology that is no longer wanted, and convert them to Object-Oriented languages such as C# or Java.

Astadia will take any application developed in COBOL and automatically transform it into a C# functionally identical application, ready to run on Windows and .NET.

Since both the COBOL to C# conversion and the testing is fully automated, the outcome of the project is fully predictable, in terms of risks, costs, and duration.

The migrated application is completely free of dependencies on Astadia software and relies on industry standard technologies instead.

Three Strong Promises

All Astadia migrations ensure three types of equivalence:

Functional equivalence: the converted C# application’s behavior is identical to that of the original COBOL one

Performance equivalence: the converted C# application will perform at least as well as the original COBOL one (of course, assuming adequate infrastructure)

Maintenance equivalence: maintenance of the converted application will be comparable in effort to the original COBOL application

Why Migrate from COBOL to C#?

COBOL has been declared dead more than once the past decades, yet the number of COBOL lines of code in use is still growing year-by-year.

There are however many good reasons to contemplate a migration from COBOL to C#. These are typically the major concerns for businesses:

• High (and rising) maintenance and runtime fees for the existing COBOL products
• Shrinking availability of COBOL developers and lack of interest in COBOL from young developers
• The End-of-life scenarios for certain COBOL technologies
• Lack of application extensibility and interoperability with other, non-COBOL applications

Converting from COBOL to C# and the .NET platform offer answers to all these concerns:

• Support fees are negligible or even non-existing;
• C# is one of the most widely-used programming languages today and actively being developed;
• The .NET platform is constantly extending as well becoming available on more operating systems and devices.

Next to that, a COBOL to C# transformation also means:

• Enabling the use of a state-of-the-art IDE, with extensive debugging, refactoring, profiling and (unit)testing support.
• Enabling the use of thousands of third-party libraries, covering almost all imaginable computing needs.

CodeTurn for COBOL to C# Transformation

Astadia uses its own specialized tools to automate the migration of COBOL sources to C#, guaranteeing code quality, avoiding risks, and offering full predictability through 100% automation.

The architecture of the COBOL to C# converter contains:

• A parser that support many COBOL dialect syntax, and embedded languages
• A resolver that computes detailed control-flow and data-usage information
• Conversion rules for all COBOL syntax, from single statements to complex patterns of code
• A code generator for C# enabling any desired coding style

Key Traits of Astadia's COBOL to C# Migration Tool

• Handles all COBOL data types with 100% fidelity
• Handles also complex GO TO and PERFORM/fallthrough based control-flow
• Handles POINTER, BASED and ADDRESS OF
• Favors simple mappings when possible while having fallback mappings when needed
• Has clean mappings for most COPY and many COPY…REPLACING directives
• Resulting code takes maximal advantage of modern IDEs refactoring possibilities so further changes can be done in an incremental and type-safe way
• Resulting code can be configured to be more OO-style or more procedural style
• Offers many out-of-the-box customization possibilities
• A plugin-based architecture making it easy to create project-specific conversion rules
• Enables modernization of UI  and data storage
• Built to take advantage of massive parallelization resulting in even the biggest source code sets (with tens of millions of LOC) being converted in a matter of hours

‍

Additional Resources

COBOL Migrations

CodeTurn COBOL to Java Fact Sheet

CodeTurn COBOL to COBOL Fact Sheet

‍

Visit our Case Studies to see how we use automation to help organizations accelerate digital transformation.

‍

‍