Tool Priorities

New and Existing Tools

List contains a list of new tools to port and/or existing tools to enhance. The demand percentages are based on the last major survey.

Critical Priority

• Vim with Dataset I/O Support: High demand (26%), critical for bridging traditional and modern workflows.
  GitHub Repository

  • ENQ: Do you want it to lock during the entire editing session, or only until you write it?
  • ISPF statistics: User ID and timestamp of change. What should we do with version/creation/lines changed? Do we need all or a subset of ISPF stats?

• Coreutils: High demand (30%), fundamental for UNIX operations on z/OS.

  • Next step: Determine which tools should have extra z/OS support added.
  • Break it into different pieces (high-priority items vs. future items).

• Gzip: Add HW acceleration to speed up deflate.

• Zip/Unzip: Add HW acceleration to speed up deflate (uses zlib).

• Performance Analysis on Neovim

• Rust: Very high demand (55%), enables safe systems programming on z/OS. Handled by IBM dev team.

---

High Priority

• rsync (Enhanced): High demand (22%), essential for file synchronization in hybrid cloud.

  • Investigate further to see which cases work and which do not.

• CMake: Add support for z/OS languages like COBOL, PLI, and PLX.

• Procps (ps, top, watch): Moderate demand (15%), supplements existing monitoring tools.

• Neovim: High demand (20%), improves developer experience + support for LSP.

  • Performance analysis to determine the culprit.
  • Build without LuaJIT on Mac or LoZ.

• LuaJIT: Improves Neovim performance.

• libgcrypt: A GPG library. Adds HW acceleration to speed up compression/encryption.

• LLVM: High demand (25%), crucial for development toolchains and language support.

  • Handled by IBM C/C++ dev team.

---

Medium Priority

• Gradle: Moderate demand (13%), enhances build automation.

• nginx: Moderate demand (10%), critical for hosting web services and APIs.

• CCache: 18% demand, speeds up build times.

• PostgreSQL: 13% demand, most advanced open-source database, includes AI functions.

• htop: Moderate demand (15%), provides real-time resource monitoring.

• Git Extras: Needed for advanced Git workflows, enhances productivity.

• OpenSSL (Accelerated): High demand (18%), leverages z/OS hardware for cryptographic operations.

  • Curl and Git would benefit from performance improvements.

• Bash Completion: Improves shell usability.

• Valgrind: Medium demand (18%), improves debugging and profiling.

  • A significant effort to port.

• fzf: Moderate demand (8%), aids in searching through files and directories.

• SSHFS: Low demand (7%), useful for remote file access over SSH.

• Redis: Low demand (5%), adds in-memory database capabilities.

• nmap: Moderate demand (8%), key for network diagnostics and security.

• grpc: Moderate demand (8%), enables remote procedure calls between services.

• rclone: Low demand (3%), expands cloud integration capabilities.

  • Could be a good alternative to rsync.

• Git secret: GitHub Repository

  • Enables Git to store encrypted data.

---

Low Priority

• OpenBLAS: Low demand, relevant for AI-based inferencing.

• Midnight Commander: Convenience for file management.

• MySQL: Low demand (7%), adds RDBMS capabilities but overlaps with other tools.

• Wireshark: Essential for packet analysis in specific scenarios.

• OpenVPN: Providing a secure connection on z/OS.
  GitHub Repository