Re: [Was: OCamlJit 2.0]

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 20-11-2010, Yoann Padioleau <padator@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2010, at 9:08 AM, Jon Harrop wrote:
>
>>> Do we have example of big companies porting their whole codebase to
>>> another language ?
>> 
>> Yes, of course. Companies modernise all the time. We have a client who just
>> started porting 1MLOC of C++ to F#.
>
> How they do that ? Are they using compiler frontends to assist them
> in automatically translating part of the code to F# ?
>

I worked for Metaware (http://www.metaware.fr). This company does source
to source migration of COBOL code. We also tried once to do COBOL to
Java translation using internal tools... It works, but probably not the
way you expect... Or maybe the same way obrowser works in fact: you
create a VM that interpret something in between COBOL and Java. You
loose comments and meanings in between. The result is 100%
unmaintainable/unreadable and at least 2x bigger. 

We stopped this kind of migration, because the result was not exactly
great (but it works). 

>> It happens all the time but it is even
>> more likely to happen as a consequence of multicore.

I doubt an old code, not written with multicore in mind is easily
portable to multicore. So basically, the migration you are talking about
is starting a new project that will replace one software/library by
another. 

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall