IBM has been recently promoting Docker on z. IBM argues the high I/O capabilities of their platform are a good fit for the container model. (I don't disagree with them. The many-application-on-big-hardware model is not a new concept to IBM. Hell, they invented it.)<p>Anyways... Since Docker is written in Go, the only way Docker has been available for s390x was by building with gccgo. My guess is that native Go support is in the interest of Docker on z and would be a worthwhile investment for IBM.
Pascal once ran on IBM nainframes for an easy to learn, read, and compile solution. Go is latest in Wirth philosophy of languages. Good it's going on mainframe, too.<p>Even better is that it's often used for I/O intensive (eg networking) applications. Mainframes' Channel I/O blows traditional server architecture away in throughput. Should give a boost.
They also created a native OCaml backend for IBM Z very recently: <a href="https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275</a>