Re: RPG on other platforms?

My answer would be approximately the same as Henrik's, except that I'm
really curious why you're asking.

That's a good question. But whatever the reason, it was probably
ill-conceived. And if pursued by any angle for any duration, it will likely
be ill-fated by orders of magnitude.

Odds are, somebody has an IBM i based application which somebody is
interested in migrating to another platform, and they figure that an RPG
compiler might assist in the process.

From a tool developer perspective, history is riddled with the corpses of

organizations which tried to assist with migrations of IBM i (and
predecessor) applications by providing an RPG compiler. Back in the day
when Windows was considered a platform and THICK-Client was viewed as the
way to go, even IBM tried to support it with VARPG, which ultimately
failed. The efforts succumbed to competitive pressures from Microsoft's
tool divisions on the one hand, and IBM i modernization on the other.

I would suggest that Windows is not really viewed as an application
platform anymore; Microsoft .Net is, and Microsoft .aspx is, but Windows
and Intel are viewed more as commodity infrastructure.

What else are examples of application platforms? LAMP - or even just PHP is
designed as an application platform. Java is not platform agnostic; rather
Java IS A PLATFORM.

Browsers with JavaScript frameworks have become so robust, that they might
be considered application platforms too.

It seems that all application platforms these days are based on virtual
machine environments; IBM i fits into that category. But of the others
mentioned, where does RPG fit in? I would suggest that it doesn't. If
migration is the goal, rather than an RPG compiler, you would be better
served by a one-time RPG transformer which converted your code-base to one
which is native to the virtual machine of your choice.

Nathan.