DownloadGnuCOBOL (formerly OpenCOBOL) is a free, modern COBOL compiler. GnuCOBOL implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85, X/Open COBOL and newer ISO COBOL standards (2002, 2014, 2023), as well as many extensions included in other COBOL compilers (IBM COBOL, MicroFocus COBOL, ACUCOBOL-GT and others).
GnuCOBOL translates COBOL into C and internally compiles the translated code using a native C compiler.
Build COBOL programs on various platforms, including GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. GnuCOBOL has also been built on HP/UX, z/OS, SPARC, RS6000, AS/400, along with other combinations of machines and operating systems.
Copyright 2001-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
The cobc compiler is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the FSF; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version.
The libcob run time support source tree is licensed under the GNU LGPL.
Features
- A nicely complete implementation of COBOL with nearly seamless C integration
- Over 9740 NIST COBOL 85 test suite tests passed, over 2500 tests in more than 1100 internal test groups
- Dialect support for COBOL85, X/Open COBOL, COBOL2002, COBOL2014, MicroFocus, IBM, MVS, ACUCOBOL-GT, RM/COBOL, BS2000, GCOS (Bull)
- Supports ORGANIZATION INDEXED along with REPORT SECTION, SCREEN SECTION, FUNCTION-ID
- Support for JSON GENERATE and XML GENERATE (XML PARSE pending)
- Almost full support of the COBOL 2023 Compiler Directing Facility feature set
- EXEC SQL preprocessors available for PostgreSQL, Firebird, ODBC, DB2
- ASCII, EBCDIC, little endian, big endian. A build published for z/OS OMVS/USS
- Multiple Source Level Debuggers available (GDB frontends or extensions as well as completely separate projects)
- Compiler built with GNU Autotools and GCC, also successfully builds with LLVM clang, VisualStudio or others
- Direct access to almost all C libraries, and even more with the C++ base
- Multiple screen libraries available including Java (AWT/SWING) and GTK+ based
- Code integrating Ada, Guile, Lua, Rexx, Javascript, Python, and others, published
- CGI capable and desktop ready
- Compiler and runtime messages translated; English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, German, French, more to come
Project Samples
License
GNU Library or Lesser General Public License version 2.0 (LGPLv2), GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2), GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), GNU Library or Lesser General Public License version 3.0 (LGPLv3)Follow GnuCOBOL
User Reviews
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Excellent!
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Thank you for providing this amazing software for free!
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Very good implementation of COBOL. Developers appear to be very active improving and adding features. OOP is not available yet but that is not unusual ILE COBOL for the IBM iSeries systems implements only 1985 standard with 1989 and 1993 improvements but does not support any 21st century standards and thus has no classes, methods, or properties. GNU COBOL implements 2002 and 2014 with only the exclusion of OOP. Both Fujitsu and Micro Focus implement OOP via .net while GNU COBOL is decidedly multi-platform so .net is not an option for them.
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Hi! There are more information of install with red hat? I have so many issues with that, and I need install gnucobol in that! Thanks! It's a good project!Reply from GnuCOBOLPosted 2021-09-23
For Fedora, dnf install gnucobol, right out of the package repo. For RHEL, or CentOS, I'm assuming the same would work too. That would give you version 2.2, as of Sep 2020+1, I think. You can also use dnf install libcob if you don't need the compiler but need the run-time to run compiled programs. -
Decent language support. Could be nice if the syntax trees were a bit easier to extract, but I managed. Version 3.1 didn't pass all NIST tests for me. Also found an overzealous optimization.Reply from GnuCOBOLPosted 2021-07-14
Thanks for the review. We don't pass all NIST tests and skip some, mostly the one related to COMMUNICATION SECTION (not implemented "enough" to pass) and, depending on the question of ORGANIZATION INDEXED used some related tests. If you see errors in `make test`: please report via bug tracker.