Free/Libre 'GnuCOBOL' Compiler Reaches Maturity, Can Compete with Proprietary Offerings

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After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL 'has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments,' said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology. GnuCOBOL turns COBOL source code into executable applications. It is very cross-platform, running Linux, BSD, many proprietary Unixes, macOS, and Windows, even Android. And the latest version, v.32, is being used in many commercial settings...

Sobisch noted that the GnuCOBOL is seeing a lot of commercial deployments, such as for banking back-end apps, many of which are being migrated from Micro Focus, with users reporting performance improvements as a result. The French DGFIP federal agency moved from a GCOS mainframe to GnuCOBOL, with the help of Le Fessant's firm.

Originally called OpenCOBOL, the project was started in 2002 and renamed GnuCOBOL in 2013. In the past three years, it has received attention from 13 contributors with 460 commits. Most Linux package managers have a copy of GnuCOBOL for the program for downloading... It can compile to C code (C89+), making it extremely portable, from mainframes to Raspberry Pi's, Sobisch said...

Also new is SuperBOL, a development studio for GnuCOBOL developed by Le Fessant's OCamlPro. It runs as a VSCode Extension and features a full COBOL processor (written in OCaml).

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