10th July 2014, 1 min read

No Perl and PHP on Mainframe from IBM

IBM no longer provides Perl for its mainframe machines, see Software withdrawal: Selected IBM System z platform products (a copy is here: IBM-Withdrawal-ENUS913-252). It looks like they have not heard that Perl is the duct tape that holds the internet together. Similarly IBM withdraw PHP from their mainframe platform. So Wikipedia and Facebook will not run on big iron. Not that Wikipedia or Facebook ever wanted to, but now IBM pulled the plug.

In the same vein all IBM has to offer their customers is 32-bit COBOL on their mainframe, so customers can only use less than 2 GB, see Memory Limitations with IBM Enterprise COBOL Compiler.

In earlier times IBM tried to sell their VisualAge products, which where notoriously slow, and never really took off. Now they aggressively sell WebSphere.

Who makes these decisions? And who approves this?

In defense of IBM, there is a company called Rocket Software which provides Perl and PHP. So it's like going to McDonald's ordering a hamburger, but the clerk tells you that you should buy the bread separately from the nearby bakery.

Added 31-Mar-2024: Rocket Software only offers the outdated PHP 7 version. So it really seems that IBM and Rocket Software do not want to have PHP on big iron.