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…