Benefits of Translation

As with the previous page, the following is just an indicative list, and is in no way complete.

Uniformity within an organisation

If all software within an organisation is written using the same language, it helps with efficiency. You are able to allocate work to any team member without having to worry about whether they are fluent in a particular language. It also improves the ability of team members to support each other.

Support

Translating from a less popular to a more popular language increases the availability of support. This can mean support online via forums, or the availability of additional staff in the future.

Support new Hardware

A system may have been written in machine code for a particular CPU architecture. Move forwards ten years and the microarchitecture of a new CPU is significantly different: it includes new instructions that older CPUs lacked. Whilst you could re-write the assembly code, you may be better off choosing a higher-level language which doesn’t suffer from this problem. If you stick with assembly code, every time the CPU architecture changes, the code will need re-authoring. Choose a language such as C, C++, C# etc avoids this, as the compiler will be able to simply recompile code to newer standards.