Go on z/OS

[Bill O'Farrell]

Hello everyone. IBM (which I work for) has a long history with Go. It is our desire to upstream a current-level Go compiler port for z/OS in due course -- with community agreement, of course.  In order to facilitate this, we'd like to start upstreaming some z/OS-specific changes to the "x" extended packages.  If possible, it would be useful to get some z/OS-specific changes in x/sys/cpu and x/net in time for the upcoming freeze date.  This should not disrupt other platforms. Note that having upstreamed z/OS support in the golang.org/x repos is very beneficial to users of our compiler port, independent of whether the z/OS compiler port itself is upstreamed. 

z/OS is an operating system for s390x (a.k.a. "The Mainframe"), for which a Linux Go compiler has been upstreamed for a number of years. The ancestry of z/OS goes back many decades, rooted in business applications (e.g. today ~90 percent of all credit card transactions are processed on z/OS). More recently, IBM has stated that it intends to deliver containers and Kubernetes orchestration on z/OS, which drives a renewed focus on Go.

https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/897/ENUS220-033/index.html&request_locale=en

Here is IBM's statement regarding enabling Go on z/OS.

https://developer.ibm.com/mainframe/2020/04/24/ibm-intends-to-enable-go-on-z-os/

Those with a good memory may remember that IBM previously (i.e. before Kubernetes' explosive growth) produced a compiler at the Go 1.6 level for z/OS. That effort constitutes a basis for the current endeavour. A reminder of that previous work is that there is already an upstream runtime/internal/sys/zgoos_zos.go file and a zos build tag.

Thanks in advance for your understanding and assistance.

Bill O'Farrell

Go on z/OS Team Lead

[Ian Lance Taylor]

For the record, this certainly all seems fine.

Ian

[Russ Cox]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2020 at 4:33 PM Ian Lance Taylor <ia...@golang.org> wrote:

> Hello everyone. IBM (which I work for) has a long history with Go. It is our desire to upstream a current-level Go compiler port for z/OS in due course -- with community agreement, of course.  In order to facilitate this, we'd like to start upstreaming some z/OS-specific changes to the "x" extended packages.  If possible, it would be useful to get some z/OS-specific changes in x/sys/cpu and x/net in time for the upcoming freeze date.  This should not disrupt other platforms. Note that having upstreamed z/OS support in the golang.org/x repos is very beneficial to users of our compiler port, independent of whether the z/OS compiler port itself is upstreamed.

For the record, this certainly all seems fine.

Yes, sounds good. Thanks for the heads up.

Best,

Russ