Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn’t expect to be writing about… An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language.
It was last month that the COBOL front-end patches for GCC were seeing new patch activity. Many criticized that as being old and out of place. Well, the ALGOL 68 front-end patches are even more unexpected and not something I expected to be writing about in 2025.
ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that debuted in 1968. But it’s usage has always been rather niche and with very limited use. Back in the early 200s there was a GPL-licensed ALGOL 68 GPL-based compiler published (a68g) and experimental GCC front-end patches before… Jose Marchesi of Oracle worked on the ALGOL 68 experimental front-end patches before but it wasn’t on my bingo card to see this work trying to go mainline in GCC in 2025.
Marchesi wrote this New Year’s day on the GCC mailing list:
“This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see 😉 At the very least having support in GCC will make it easier for Algol 68 enthusiasts to write, share and use their programs in modern systems.
This is work in progress, but the front-end can already compile most of the main language constructs and many full programs.”
But not all of the ALGOL 68 language features are yet to be implemented. The hope is for GNU Algol 68 to be a strict super-language of the Algol 68 report.
For those wanting to see some ALGOL 68 code samples:
Those interested in the ALGOL 68 programming language in 2025 can find the work-in-progress patches on the GCC mailing list. We’ll see how the progress and review on these patches go and if the ALGOL 68 front-end manages to become accepted in mainline GCC in 2025.
