Thanks to advice and reviews from AI, Bob reports:
“Ladies and gentlemen.
I was just successful performing a gdb-cobol debugging session hosted on an Intel computer where I remotely debugged a COBOL program compiled and running on a target IBM System Z.
I think I will leave it to others to provide a sense of just how big a deal this potentially is.”
Yes, it’s a big deal. Very. #gcobol #cobol
The code review and enhancements to the Gnu Project Debugger (gdb) for COBOL debugging (GCC COBOL - gcobol) are largely done. The hard part of preparing all of the changes for a proposed “patch” for gdb upstream continues. Watch the COBOLworx download site for packages, in the interim, of “gdb-cobol”!
This is one of the bigger recent accomplishments of the gcobol team. Many of the others are odds and ends needed to keep a couple of our collaborators moving towards getting their programs compiled with gcobol and running, at least in test. The recent substack snark about IBM 1403 printers is an example.
The support for “EXEC SQL” (COBOL SQL support) using the native API for PostgreSQL is moving along but that won’t be part of the function freeze at the end of the year. Any compiler changes required SHOULD be done by 2027-01-01 but the preprocessor likely won’t be completed by then.
Just an update from COBOLworx land.
The decision is made: The COBOL front-end for GCC will be proclaimed Feature Complete before the end of the year. Bug fixes only between then and GCC 18 Release in the Spring! Current gcobol-17 pre-release packages available on #cobolworx website. PLEASE give it some exercise.
Our gcobol performance tracking reports are produced with a python program! Sad. When you say report, think COBOL! After all that is what, at root, the language was designed for. So I’m rewriting them in COBOL, a righteous thing to do IMHO. We’ll see how long it takes.
I deserve some fun, after all. All the writing for the web site is work! This is play.
I just posted my thoughts about The Translation Trap on Substack. Machine translations of one language to another are always human-challenging if downright unreadable.Working to produce idiomatic language x from language y is super hard. Ask Heirloom Computing. But translating COBOL to COBOL is easy.
The big hit at CarolinaCodes! conference this year was the badge; it was a microprocessor and led printed circuit board. CircuitPython is installed with a full library. 4GB of ram, Wifi, and Bluetooth. Most of the heavy coders were coding the entire conference. We put up our 4’x6' Cobolworx® banner … a bit low as they didn’t have atep ladder and it was OK as it was. And we had a 32" monitor (that I was planning on getting rid of) to display code if questions came up.
Back from the Free and Open Source Software Conservancy’s FOSSY26! Around 230 attendies. The Fedicon convention also ran concurrent to the FOSSY schedule. I looked in on Fedicon but spent more time in the other tracks. I went to do a FOSS COBOL presentation. I was worried not too many of these high-powered technical people would be interested. I should not have worried. The room was full. And the presentation was well received with a lot of “audience participation” … even some heckling about my typing skills …
There was, I “knew” a patent hidden in plain sight in the GCC COBOL (gcobol) work we were doing. So I leased a small (tiny) office to give me the quiet to sort that out of the chaff. It was all chaff. I closed the office down today. gcobol runs just fine and the idea was interesting but not good enough to bother with. I’m happy to have done the work and happier to eliminate even only 8 miles a day of commute in light traffic.
Not sure what it takes to get testers for GCC COBOL (gcobol). We have one active migration project that has been very helpful in identifyng weak spots in “-dialect ibm”. That relationship has taught us a lot about the differences in support tools and processes for Technical Support for COBOL compared to OpenLDAP. Very different. Our offers still stand. We have a FREE Evaluation program where we set you up as a full Technical Support client; secure ticket queue (email and web), formal test development (“cut downs”), and responsive interactions.
Glowng report about Unum insurance using AWS Transform to rip and rewrite 1.5M liines of COBOL for ONLY $20M ($13/line). Touted as an enormous savings over the previous proposals: www.computerweekly.com/news/3666… The story is otherwise uninteresting … one of many. Two things stand out. 1.5M lines of code is a very small body of COBOL. We frequently saw proof of concept applications three to ten times that size back in the day (ten years ago).
Backing off the PR speak. LinkedIn, X, and SubStack getting little or no traction. Too many louder, glitzier voices with siren-songs from “Well Recognized Sources.”
Feeling a little silly for even trying. But that’s me.
Mainframe Update
Native character sets with GCC COBOL (gcobol) on mainframe and Intel-64 work without UAT errors. Others, not so much … yet. Furious and energetic progress is going on in the back room gcobol service bays. Also working on weekly snapshots on Ubuntu/Debian and 🤞🏼🤔 Red Hat.
Recent Tortoise sighting: he was on his way to the beach to wash off and curled up as we walked by. We’re all friends here. Pippen didn’t even bark once.
A 2 doctor day; hurray!?
Back to writing tests for reported issues. Hooray. At least COBOLworx.com is up and done for now.
I’m ready for the weekend.
Wired magazine snakily referred to COBOL as the asbestos of programming languages. I disagreed; assembler language programs are the asbestos. And many other dead and forgotten languages that have production programs running. Obviously they need a bit more real world experience.
The new plant has been planted. The Amazon paper order (2 kinds of paper towels and toilet paper) has been temporarily stowed. The bathroom lights have been centtered by REAL electricians. And basically NOTHING else got done. And the Glass door for the shower comes at 8:30 tomorrow so that’s another morning shot. And I play at getting ready for two conferences. And herding the catz.
So several hundred words later, my attempts to use MarsEdit was a bust. Some secret handshake failed. And the messaging makes no sense to me so, one more time …]
GCC 17 next spring will be a bigger improvement Release than 16 and 16 was big. Bob is OBSESSING (bobsessing) over performance and Jim and Xavi added big improvements for User Defined Functions ... function prototypes ... from the latest COBOL Language Standards. Plus more all around.
Greg has the bones of a Support Process in place and "Joe", our confidential first porting user seems happy the way it works. It works just like 15 years of Symas's support team worked so it ought to be good.
If you want the latest tested CI/CD package, go here. It's Ubuntu 22.04/Debian for now. Dimo is sneaking up on RPMs but there's a lot of cleanup going on.
More soon.
Spent most of yesterday just getting organized. Finally went to Slack and built a canvas of checklist items. When It got longer than 20 i ranked them and started working them down. Nothing visible yet but there is a ton to do in the back room. But We Do That All The Time™.
I love the euphemism; it’s a “Guest House” you get to pay a lot of money to be a guest of.
So they came and sprayed for mosquitoes on the coldest day, so far, this year. Makes perfect sense 🤔🥸