On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:13 AM James K. Lowden <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote:
> To the GCC community and GCC Steering Committee: Greetings! > > We at COBOLworx would like GCC to consider our gcobol front-end for > inclusion in the GCC project. We would like to contribute it to the > GNU Toolchain and have it merged into GCC. > > We believe our work is further along than any previous GCC Cobol > effort. As you may know, we have been working on the project for over > a year. Much of the last 9 months have been devoted to testing for > correctness. The compiler now passes the core module of the NIST > CCVS-85 test suite. Although not ready for production use by any > means, we expect to pass all relevant aspects of CCVS-85 later this > year. > > Old as it is, Cobol is far from dead. Estimates run into billions of > lines written, with millions more added each year, even today. But -- > because there has never been a free, fully functional, > source-to-machine compiler for it -- Cobol remains largely locked > behind expensive, proprietary walls. GCC can change that. > > Cobol also offers a window into what was and might yet be. In Seibel's > "Coders at Work", Fran Allen put it this way: > > "There was a debate between Steve Johnson, of Bell Labs, who > were supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison.... The nubbin > of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers > anymore because the programmer would take care of it." > > and > > "By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, > Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have > seriously regressed since C developed." > > Modern hardware, and GCC's 100 optimization passes, are evidence Fran > Allen was right. Cobol, with its 2 dozen high-level verbs and > integrated I/O, provides a theoretical opportunity to surpass even C's > performance in its problem domain, because the compiler has more > information and more leeway. > > As a technical matter, to be sure we are far from achieving that goal. > It is, as I said, an opportunity. As we hone our skills, we look > forward to learning together with others to make it a reality. > > Signed, > > Marty Heyman, James K. Lowden, Robert Dubner > The GCC Steering Committee has approved GCobol as a new front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection. Congratulations! This is the administrative approval. The initial patches must be technically approved by a GCC Global Reviewer. Please coordinate this with the GCC Global Reviewers and Release Managers for the next or future Stage 1 development cycle. GCC welcomes support for new languages. COBOL is an important but niche language in 2023. GCobol will not be a primary language that is considered critical for a GCC Release, and if GCobol becomes a maintenance burden, the GCC SC and community may revisit support for COBOL. We look forward to COBOL support in a future release of GCC. Thanks, David
