On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 17:36:11 -0500 Charlie Li <vish...@freebsd.org> wrote:
> is interest. There is now a FreeBSD Laptop Desktop Working Group > (LDWG) [0] that meets monthly (on Jitsi), with some Foundation > involvement, Can I talk to you about gcc? FSVO $talk and $you? As perhaps some here assembled may know, I've been working on adding COBOL to gcc for the last, oh, 4 years. The idea was adopted by the GCC steering committee a couple years back, and now we're in the midst of having our patches applied upstream, hopefully for inclusion in gcc-15, due for release next year. Yes, we're already talking about mid-2026. For expediency, we've been developing in Ubuntu. It's ~everywhere; for example I use Ubuntu Multipass on macOS to install Linux virtual machines on my laptop. I don't guess LDWG cares about that kind of environment, but it's one reason (of many) that Linux is where we started. I was contacted upon a time about patches for FreeBSD, but that conversation petered out. I would still like to make sure the compiler and runtime library build and install happily on FreeBSD (well, *BSD). I'm happy to work with anyone who shares that goal. Some may ask: Why? Why COBOL? If I may be permitted.... The answer is simply this: 100 billlion lines or more. There is a lot of COBOL out there you've never seen. There is a (measured) 95% probability your last ATM transaction went through a COBOL application written in the 1980s, if not earlier. The books-and-records applications written for the mainframe Back In The Day still run, because computing interest hasn't changed. Actually: *can't* change, because no one wants their interest calculated differently. Can't change is why those applications still run on the mainframe, using emulation provided by IBM for machines they haven't manufactured in decades. Rest assured, it works. It has to. it is also Not Cheap. Mayhap you, dear reader, work for such an organization. If all goes according to plan, there will be two open-source compilers for COBOL: GnuCOBOL, which converts COBOL to C, and uses gcc to compile that, and gcc-cobol, which is just gcc. That means two ways to "lift and shift": compile the unaltered COBOL source code for any gcc target, and run it without paying IBM's totally reasonable mainframe licensing fees. [pitch] I can help, but I don't have to. The code is yours, both COBOL and compiler. So is the choice. Spend as much as you want. [end pitch] We'll be working on portability issues this year, and on expanding the supported architectures beyond x86_64 and aarch64. (gcc-cobol requires 128-bit integer support.) I look forward to making FreeBSD part of that story. --jkl _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@lists.nycbug.org https://lists.nycbug.org:8443/mailman/listinfo/talk
