OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant said that after 20 years of development, open source GnuCOBOL "has reached industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary products in all environments."
GnuCOBOL is a free modern COBOL compiler, formerly known as OpenCOBOL and renamed GnuCOBOL in 2013. Implements most of the COBOL 85,
GnuCOBOL translates COBOL to C and compiles the translated code internally using a native C compiler. Build COBOL programs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. GnuCOBOL can also be built on HP/UX, z/OS, SPARC, RS6000, AS/400, and other machine and operating system combinations.
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages, dating back to around 1959; but it is still widely used by large organizations to process data from important central systems such as billing, accounts, payroll, and customer transactions. A 2022 survey noted that 92% of respondents considered COBOL to be of strategic importance, with the amount of COBOL code in daily use increasing significantly to 775-850 billion lines; approximately three times the previous estimate.
GnuCOBOL project leader Simon Sobisch pointed out that GnuCOBOL is undergoing a large number of commercial deployments, such as banking back-end applications, many of which are migrated from Micro Focus, and users report that performance has been improved as a result. Implementations of GnuCOBOL code can run on thousands of processors, giving project developers the opportunity to tune performance and memory usage in large use cases.
Sobisch said that GnuCOBOL passed 97% of the COBOL 85 conformance tests in terms of compliance, surpassing existing proprietary products. However, GnuCOBOL does not support objects or messages yet. Sobisch explained: "Objects are a great feature in COBOL 22, but they are not used much."
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