GnuCOBOL is a free (like both in "free speech" and in "free beer") COBOL compiler, formerly known as OpenCOBOL. It implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85, COBOL 2002 and COBOL 2014 standards, as well as many extensions. GnuCOBOL translates COBOL into C and compiles the translated code using the native C compiler on various platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, IBM z/OS, Unix, AS/400, and Microsoft Windows.
GnuCOBOL is an implementation of COBOL. For further information see:
- Discussion boards on SourceForge
- Documentation: Guides, including Programmer's Guide, FAQ and How-To (HTML and PDFs)
- Project space at Savannah
- Download Page
- Questions and answers tagged with cobol
An IDE explicit targeting GnuCOBOL is Gix-IDE, which comes with a source-level debugger, ESQL preprocessor and more. Editors based on vscode can also be setup for a "near IDE" experience to edit, compile and debug GnuCOBOL.
Please report bugs and raise issues you see with migrations to GnuCOBOL at either the discussion boards or in the feature request tracker.
Additional tools and COBOL source samples tested with GnuCOBOL are made available by the community.
See info pages for COBOL and COBOL85 for more information about the language.
