While it’s an old language, in recent months there’s been a renewed effort over a COBOL language front-end for the GCC compiler. There’s been out-of-tree COBOL support for GCC that is working to get into the mainline GNU Compiler Collection codebase. This weekend saw the latest iteration of those patches amounting to 134k lines of new code.
James Lowden who has been leading the push to get the COBOL support upstreamed into GCC posted the new 15 patches totaling 134,033 lines of code. This gets the COBOL front-end building and working for GCC.
Compared to the patches posted at the end of 2024, the new COBOL front-end patches are re-based against the newer GCC code, updates to the newer Autoconf, various other build system updates, documentation improvements, change-logs added, and debugging improvements.
The COBOL code still needs to see work completed around cross-compilation handling and some other minor changes.
At least from the patch series the hope is that this COBOL front-end might be merged in time for the upcoming GCC 15 release:
“I remain obdurately hopeful the COBOL front end will be deemed ready for gcc-15. The von Clausewitz test of any compiler is the real world. Users kicking the tires push us to improve the compiler in ways that are are practical to them. (Several features are now pending while we strive to meet reviewers’ concerns.) To that end, I have also prepared release notes for the www repository under separate cover.”
We’re getting late in the GCC 15 cycle for focusing on regression fixes, but given that the new COBOL front-end doesn’t risk existing language support, we’ll see if the GCC developers decide to pull in COBOL support for this year’s GNU Compiler Collection release.
