The gcobol project, which aims to create a free compiler for the COBOL programming language, is on the GCC compiler set developers mailing list. In its current form, gcobol is being developed as a fork of GCC, but after development is completed and the project stabilizes, the changes are planned to be proposed for inclusion in the main composition of GCC. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The reason for creating the new project is a desire to obtain a free licensed COBOL compiler that makes it easier to migrate applications from IBM mainframes to systems running Linux. The community has been developing a separate free project GnuCOBOL for a long time, but it is a compiler that translates code into C language, and also does not provide full support even for the COBOL 85 standard and does not pass the full set of benchmarks, which repels financial institutions that use COBOL in working projects.
Gcobol is based on proven GCC technologies and has been developed for over a year by a full-time one engineer. The existing GCC backend is used to generate executable files, and COBOL source processing is separated into a separate frontend developed by the project. In the current video, the compiler successfully builds 100 examples from the Beginning COBOL for Programmers book. Support for ISAM and COBOL object-oriented extensions is planned to be added to gcobol in the coming weeks. Within a few months, the functionality of gcobol is planned to be brought to pass the NIST benchmark test suite.
COBOL turns 63 this year and remains one of the oldest programming languages ββin active use, as well as one of the leaders in terms of the amount of code written. The language continues to evolve, with COBOL-2002 adding features for object-oriented programming, and COBOL 2014 introducing support for the IEEE-754 floating point specification, method overloading, and dynamically expanding 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. For example, as of 2017, 43% of banking systems continued to use COBOL. The COBOL code is used in the processing of about 80% of personal financial transactions and in 95% of terminals for accepting bank card payments.
Source: opennet.ru