News: 0001533090

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

COBOL Language Frontend Merged For GCC 15 Compiler

([GNU] 39 Minutes Ago COBOL GCC Compiler)


A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming [1]GCC 15 compiler... The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!

The GNU Compiler Collection in recent months has seen a [2]resurgence in activity around COBOL language support . The [3]134k+ lines of code adding a COBOL front-end for GCC is an unexpected surprise to see merged now in the year 2025. COBOL isn't as popular as it once was especially during an era in which Rust is taking much of the spotlight, but at least it's more practical than [4]the recently rejected ALGOL 68 language front-end .

Invoking the COBOL compiler front-end on GCC 15+ can be done using the gcobol command. For years the code was developed out-of-tree and more information on it can be found via [5]cobolworx.com .

Part of the motivation for this recent effort for a COBOL compiler front-end for GCC has been to help migrate traditional mainframe applications over to Linux for local use and in the cloud.

Merged to upstream GCC this morning was the [6]COBOL frontend , [7]libgcobol , [8]documentation on the new gcobol compiler command, and other related bits.

Look forward to the COBOL support alongside many other features when the GCC 15.1 stable release happens in the coming weeks.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GCC+15

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-COBOL-2023

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/134k-Lines-v2-COBOL-For-GCC

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ALGOL-68-No-GCC-2025

[5] https://cobolworx.com/pages/cobforgcc.html

[6] https://gcc.gnu.org/git?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=3c5ed996ac94a15bc2929155f2c69cc85eef89f7

[7] https://gcc.gnu.org/git?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=a0754187274a36443707eab5506ae53ab1d71ad2

[8] https://gcc.gnu.org/git?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=ab79cd87c8a87760bcc29dc4ffc643672e861250



phoronix

Technicality, n.:
In an English court a man named Home was tried for slander in having
accused a neighbor of murder. His exact words were: "Sir Thomas Holt
hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head, so that one
side of his head fell on one shoulder and the other side upon the
other shoulder." The defendant was acquitted by instruction of the
court, the learned judges holding that the words did not charge murder,
for they did not affirm the death of the cook, that being only an
inference.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"