At the start of the calendar year there was [1]a proposal for a new GCC front-end for the Algol 68 programming language . GCC developers [2]deferred merging Algol 68 support into GCC for this rarely talked about vintage programming language. But as talked about back at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025, [3]the developer is still working on the support . Sure enough, this week brought a new version of this GCC front-end.

Jose E. Marchesi of Oracle is the one that has been leading the effort to introduce an Algol 68 programming language front-end within the GNU Compiler Collection. Last weekend brought the [4]v2 patches for this front-end. The new patches added all the missing core language constructs with the exception of parallel clauses. The new code also finished work on standard prelude support as well as adding a POSIX prelude. Plus there have been many bug fixes and improvements since the time these patches were posted back in January.

In the time since, yesterday brought [5]v3 patches that re-based against the latest GCC Git state, reorganizing the patches, consolidating some of the command line options, and other improvements. Plus there ended up being a [6]v4 series as well to add a few items missed out on from the v3 patches.

We'll see if there is enough interest at this stage for getting this "ga68" front-end upstreamed to GCC.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-ALGOL-68-Language-Front-End

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

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-ALGOL-68-Still-Going

[4] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2025-October/697255.html

[5] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2025-October/697947.html

[6] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2025-October/698011.html