COBOL Analyzer vs. IBM Developer for z Systems vs. JavaScript vs. Lua Comparison Chart

IBM® Developer for z/OS® (IDz) is a modern, robust toolset for developing and maintaining IBM z/OS applications through the use of DevOps practices. It helps you deliver more, faster, with better quality and greater agility. IBM Developer for z/OS, formerly Rational Developer for z Systems (RDz), offers COBOL, PL/I, High Level Assembler, REXX, C/C++, JCL, and JavaTM development tools on an Eclipse base. With Enterprise Edition, developers have the option to choose Microsoft VS Code or Red Hat(R) CodeReady Workspaces for their daily z/OS development work. IBM z/OS application development tools offer a simple to use, intuitive user interface. A fully integrated debugger provides developers the ability to test, examine, monitor, and control the execution of programs in context. Modern editors appeal to new mainframe developers, while ISPF style editors offer navigation that is familiar to traditional mainframe developers.

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.