About COBOLworx

COBOLworx is a project of Symas Corporation. After a period of collaboration with an industry partner, we picked up COBOL on Open Source Platforms as a second corporate initiative. Current COBOLworx team members are Jim Lowden, Bob Dubner, and Marty Heyman.

We began our involvement as users of GnuCOBOL for technology prototypes. As time went on COBOLworx team members became Contributors then Committers to GnuCOBOL.

Bob developed the GnuCOBOL Source Level Debugging extensions. That capability introduced the first source-level debugging to the COBOL language marketplace. COBOL developers now have the power of the Gnu Project Debugger (gdb) for their development processes.

COBOLworx decided to develop a full, native COBOL language “front-end” for the Gnu Compiler Collection. Effectively, Jim and Bob have worked full time on this project throughout.

Officially called GCC COBOL, the compiler is invoked as gcobol. It took a bit over three years and has been merged into GCC 15 for delivery late April or early May, 2025. The gdb integration has been developed in parallel.