Fabrice Le Fessant summarized the 20-year development of the free GnuCOBOL compiler, which allows you to translate COBOL programs into a C representation for subsequent compilation using GCC or other C compilers. According to Fabris, the project has reached maturity, readiness for use in industrial systems and the ability to compete with proprietary solutions. GnuCOBOL's competitive advantages include support for 19 dialects of the COBOL language, high performance and cross-platform, allowing the toolkit to be used on various systems, including Linux, BSD, macOS, Windows, Android and many proprietary Unix-like OSes.
According to the speaker, recently there has been an active implementation of GnuCOBOL by commercial companies and banks, which are transferring backends written in COBOL to GnuCOBOL from the proprietary Micro Focus compiler. It is noted that the transition to GnuCOBOL allows you to achieve increased productivity and get rid of lock-in to one vendor. For example, the French Ministry of Finance recently replaced a mainframe computer running the GCOS operating system with a solution based on GnuCOBOL.
Among the events related to GnuCOBOL, we can also mention the publication of the first version of the integrated development environment SuperBOL Studio, written in the OCaml language and distributed under the AGPLv3, MIT and ISC licenses. SuperBOL Studio is an extension to the VS Code code editor that works with the GnuCOBOL compiler and is designed for developing, debugging and profiling COBOL projects. SuperBOL also provides an LSP (Language Server Protocol) server implementation for integrating COBOL code navigation, parsing, and editing tools into another IDE.
This year, the COBOL language will turn 65 years old, while it remains one of the oldest actively used programming languages, as well as one of the leaders in terms of the amount of code written. The language continues to evolve, for example, the COBOL-2002 standard added capabilities for object-oriented programming, and the COBOL 2014 standard introduced support for the IEEE-754 floating-point specification, method overloading, and dynamically extensible tables. The total amount of code written in COBOL is estimated at 220 billion lines, of which 100 billion are still in use, mainly in financial institutions (as of 2017, 43% of banking systems continued to use COBOL, COBOL code was used to process about 80% of personal financial transactions and in 95% of terminals for accepting payments by bank cards).
Source: opennet.ru