GCC COBOL Compiler Support Continues To Be Worked On

While not as popular as Rust or other languages these days, for COBOL enthusiasts and those continuing to maintain codebases in this 50's programming language, the out-of-tree GCC COBOL compiler support continues to be worked on in late 2023.

James Lowden published a GCC COBOL status update on Monday for supporting this programming language with the GNU Compiler Collection. The developers involved have been working to support the ISO 2023 COBOL specification and getting their compiler support to pass an increasing number of COBOL test cases.

The COBOL 2023 standard brought asynchronous messaging, the XOR logical operator, a DELETE FILE statement, boolean shifting operators, a transaction processing facility, and other features.

Looking ahead to next year, GCC COBOL developers are planning to work on user acceptance testing, support for EXEC SQL, updated GDB debugger support, and any changes needed as part of upstream GCC code review.

More details on the current GCC COBOL state via this mailing list post.

The project page is currently at COBOLWORX.com.