Making for an exciting holiday weekend night is the Algol 68 programming language front-end "ga68" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase. After [1]COBOL language support landed in GCC 15 earlier this year, next year's GCC 16 release is adding support for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language.

Back on the first of January [2]the GCC Algol 68 patches were posted for review by Oracle engineer Jose E. Marchesi. In March the GCC steering committee [3]decided not to merge the Algol 68 patches but [4]the patches continued to be worked on and following [5]the latest GCC Algol 68 "ga68" patches posted last week, the GCC steering committee had a change of heart. They decided to [6]allow Algol 68 support into the GCC codebase as an "experimental" front-end and one that wouldn't be enabled by default. Algol 68 also isn't blocking on the GCC release criteria. Should the Algol 68 code become unmaintained, it will be removed.

Well, in the past hour the Algol 68 front-end has been merged to GCC Git. This Algol 68 "ga68" front-end will be part of the GCC 16.1 stable release due out next March~April.

[7]

A number of patches were merged into the [8]latest GCC Git code introducing all of this Algol 68 support.

If unfamiliar with the Algol 68 language and missed the earlier Phoronix articles, here is a sample code snippet:

[9]GCC 16 continues shaping up to be a big release for this open-source compiler stack.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-15-Merges-COBOL

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

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

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Algol-68-GCC-Patches-Updated

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Algol-68-GCC-Adds-Modules

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Allowing-Algol-68-Front-End

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=algol_68_merged_lrg

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

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GCC+16