Factory Le Fessant, led by Fabrice Le Fessant, has announced the completion of a 20-year-old project involving the design of a free compiler called GNUCOBOL. This compiler allows users to write COBOL programs in the SI language for subsequent compilation using GCC or other SI-compilers. The factory has stated that the project has reached maturity and is ready for use in industrial systems, competing with proprietary solutions.
GNUCOBOL boasts several advantages, including support for 19 COBOL dialects, high performance, and cross-platform capabilities. It can be utilized on various systems such as Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows, Android, and many proprietary Unix-like OS. Commercial companies and banks are actively transitioning from Micro Focus proprietary compilers to GNUCOBOL, citing increased performance and freedom from dependence on a single supplier. For instance, France’s Ministry of Finance recently switched from a Maynframe system to a solution based on gnucobol.
Another development related to GNUCOBOL is the release of the first version of the integrated development environment called Superbol Studio. Written in Ocaml and distributed under AGPLV3, MIT, and ISC licenses, Superbol Studio is designed to work with the Gnucobol compiler. It facilitates the development, debugging, and profiling of Cobol projects and includes an LSP server for integration with IDEs for code navigation, analysis, and editing.
As the Cobol language approaches its 65th year, it remains one of the oldest actively used programming languages and a leader in terms of written code volume. Recent standards like COBOL-2002 and COBOL 2014 have introduced new features such as object-oriented programming support and enhanced calculations with IEEE-754 floating points. Despite its age, COBOL continues to be prevalent in financial institutions, with around 100 billion lines of code still in use out of a total of 220 billion lines written.