A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler… The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!
The GNU Compiler Collection in recent months has seen a resurgence in activity around COBOL language support. The 134k+ lines of code adding a COBOL front-end for GCC is an unexpected surprise to see merged now in the year 2025. COBOL isn’t as popular as it once was especially during an era in which Rust is taking much of the spotlight, but at least it’s more practical than the recently rejected ALGOL 68 language front-end.
Invoking the COBOL compiler front-end on GCC 15+ can be done using the gcobol command. For years the code was developed out-of-tree and more information on it can be found via cobolworx.com.
Part of the motivation for this recent effort for a COBOL compiler front-end for GCC has been to help migrate traditional mainframe applications over to Linux for local use and in the cloud.
Merged to upstream GCC this morning was the COBOL frontend, libgcobol, documentation on the new gcobol compiler command, and other related bits.
Look forward to the COBOL support alongside many other features when the GCC 15.1 stable release happens in the coming weeks.
