from Hacker News

COBOL Language Front End Merged for GCC 15 Compiler

by cies on 3/11/25, 11:02 AM with 3 comments

• by jmclnx on 3/11/25, 12:58 PM

  Very nice, I wish something like this existed 30+ years ago. When Linux was becoming a thing, people were begging for a FSF COBOL. Commercial offerings were very expensive at the time. Plus the expected royalties for the binaries created.

  If this has happened 30 years ago, I think enterprise Linux would have hit the scene earlier. There were thousands of COBOL programmers in the 90s who were looking to create ERP type systems. If that had happened, maybe we would not be saddled with outrageously expensive systems like SAP and Oracle.

  With IBM owning RHEL, you would thing IBM would offer a free COBOL, or at least help out with this.

  Curious, with this still be a translation to c or native ? To me seems to be a translation, which seems to be working fine today.

• by le-mark on 3/11/25, 12:11 PM

  > Part of the motivation for this recent effort for a COBOL compiler front-end for GCC has been to help migrate traditional mainframe applications over to Linux for local use and in the cloud.

  A unixy cobol isn’t what anyone needs for mainframe migrations. There’s a lot of weirdness around calling and linking “load modules” in mainframe environments, and calling programs via jcl (passing in file handles). Plus Will CICS support be coming? Maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment on these thing?