At the start of the calendar year there was a proposal for a new GCC front-end for the Algol 68 programming language. GCC developers 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, 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 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 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 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.
