The GCC team has made an enormous contribution to the GCC COBOL compiler (gcobol) for GCC 15. They know things about the platforms they support we never thought of. So now they are comfortable GCC COBOL will fulfill the GCC portability promise. And that’s an important thing. Of course that meant that Bob and Jim were busy keeping up and fixing tests that broke and stuff like that!

The GCC team has been working on a lot of other GCC Project Release issues and it sounds like they are really close (days) from the final freeze (fork?). That starts all the prep for the non-software necessities: release notes, announcements, updates to Web pages, and the like. From what we know, the target of late April or Early May should be no problem.

So nothing is perfect at Release

GCC generally has one or two “point Releases” (14.1, 14.2) during a Release level life cycle. So, the imperfections, if any 🤔😉 will get picked up there.

And GCC COBOL is missing things

We deferred JSON, XML, and improved EXEC SQL support (native API support for PostGreSQL, DB2, Oracle, etc.) to GCC 16 in 2026. Yes, the Imperfections come first. If we miss 16 because there’s too much our end-users find that needs work, that’s OK too.

That’s not all but those are the only items on the COBOLworx priority list. We can always be influenced by those who are working with gcobol.

And Rule 0 is “Contributions Welcome” … Really! The GCC Repository is online. We’re a subdirectory. You have ideas, code, let us know. Being a GCC Project, there’s paperwork to file but that is not suppose to stop you or anyone from helping. And that goes for documentation, tests, anything!

And then there’s GDB

GDB support has been finished several times. And Overtaken By Events as GCC team make the necessary portability changes. As of 2025-04-14-16:37:12-4:00 it is busted. Maybe it will be fixed by the GCC 15 release. Or not. But development packages for GDB will be available through our Resources pages as soon as it’s properly aligned with all that.

Watch this space!