Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/887927/

The gcobol project has announced
its existence; it is a compiler for the COBOL language currently
implemented as a fork of GCC.

There’s another answer to Why: because a free Cobol compiler is an
essential component to any effort to migrate mainframe applications
to what mainframe folks still call “distributed systems”. Our goal
is a Cobol compiler that will compile mainframe applications on
Linux. Not a toy: a full-blooded replacement that solves problems.
One that runs fast and whose output runs fast, and has native gdb
support.

The developers hope to merge back into GCC after the project has advanced
further.