Version 15 of the GNU Compiler Collection is getting close to release, and as it does, some changes are not going to make it.
The latest status report isn't hugely informative, but says that it's "open for regression and documentation fixes only". The report shows there are just 17 priority-1 bugs left.
One major new feature was merged just last week: a COBOL front end. This has been in preparation for quite a while – we looked at it three years ago. Three large patches were merged last Thursday: the COBOL front end, the libcobol standard library, and the accompanying documentation.
We confess that we haven't counted, but according to Phoronix this is a whopping 134,000 lines of code. The new compiler is called gCobol and it's a true native compiler: in other words, it takes COBOL source code and emits binary executables. You shouldn't confuse it with another GNU project, the much older GnuCOBOL. GnuCOBOL – formerly called OpenCOBOL – is now nearly 25 years old, but it is not a true compiler: it translates COBOL source code into C source code, which you then compile with GCC or Microsoft Visual Studio C.
Aside from the differences in how they generate code, the two also aim for compliance with different versions of the official COBOL industry standards. GnuCOBOL is over 99 percent compatible with COBOL 2014, a hefty 955-page document which shipped on CD. The newer gCobol is aiming for compliance with the newer COBOL 2023 standard, which is nearly a third longer at 1,229 pages. Both gCobol and GnuCOBOL are backed by the independent Cobolworx consultancy.
So when GCC 15 is released, COBOL will join the list of supported languages – C, C++ and Objective-C are built in, while Ada 95, Fortran 77, and Pascal are distributed separately.
What will not be joining that list is ALGOL-68. We covered its possible inclusion at the BEGINning of 2025 but in the END it didn't make it in:
The Steering Committee has decided not to merge the Algol 68 Front-End in master at this point, but is ok with us using a branch in gcc.git to develop and maintain the front-end as well as a mailing list in algol68@gcc.gnu.org. The mailing list has been already set up by the sourceware friends.
Development continues in its own separate branch, hosted on Sourceware. Further info is still on the GNU site.
There is, of course, one big non-technical difference between these two grizzled elders of the senior high-level language club. COBOL is still in widespread use, even though often by companies who would probably quite like to get rid of it. ALGOL, on the other hand, isn't. The classic ALGOL-60 was once very widely used, and it influenced almost every other imperative programming language in the world today, from Ada to Zonnon. However the over-complex and largely unloved ALGOL-68, devised by the late Adriaan van Wijngaarden, is the version that toppled Algol from its dominant position.
Today, we suspect that one of the main uses of Algol is in the Unisys ClearPath line of mainframes. The ClearPath MCP OS, first released in 1961 and still in active maintenance, is written in a dialect of Algol, and can still be programmed in Algol today. It runs on ClearPath Forward Libra systems these days, which are based on Intel Xeon CPUs and run this 64-year-old (as opposed to 64-bit) OS via emulation on x86-64.
As for the other changes in GCC 15 that we have looked at, Xeon Phi "Larabee" support is still going, but Itanium support is not. There is still an out-of-tree development effort keeping the Linux kernel alive on Itanium, with regular updates on EPIC-Linux.org. ®