Perfect Fall Days: Highs in the 70sF and lows in the high 50sF. Mostly sunny, the rainy season stopped for a week or so. Ocean temperatures are still warm enough for beach-walking. Fern’s going to start Mahjong lessons with this group. #ameliaisland #mocama

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.

Weekly wrap: As noted, the Ubuntu 24 GDB-COBOL package is on the #cobolworx downloads page as are, as usual, the #gcobol RPM and DPKG packages. Jim's trip to IBM TechXchange as a visitor from another universe went well. gcobol should port nicely to the IBM i/Series just like LinuxOne on the z/Series.

GCC COBOL 17 Feature Freeze is getting closer so how's a good time for planning for test drives. #COBOL rocks!

Two Halloween parties (Fri. and Sat.) ... and a weather change with the time zone change. Pippen is angry as he was excluded from the parties even though Saturday's had one of his friends in attendance.

Karen the Inquisitive confirmed the lot behind us was bought by the county for the nature preserve! 💯 so our privacy is preserved.

An Intro to GDB-COBOL: Source Level Debugging for COBOL Programmers: blog post by Bob himself. This package is gdb support for GCC COBOL (gcobol). Package available on our downloads page.
https://cobolworx.com/post.php?slug=introducing-gdb-cobol-source-level-debugging-for-cobol-developers

#cobol #gcobol #cobolworx

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 ... https://marty.micro.blog/2026/10/21/the-code-review-and-enhancements.html

An even brighter, not cloudy, windy morning. 1ºF colder. The forecast says Summer is over.

Magnolia seed pods in the yard, bright cloudy, windy morning. Pippen was unhappy on the morning walk, no Pelican-trains flying by.

The video from my CarolinaCodes! 2026 talk (COBOL - Round 2) is up.

https://carolina.codes/speakers/2026/marty-heyman

#COBOLworx #cobol

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.

REMINDER: we're still offering FREE proof-of-concept support for GCC COBOL (gcobol) and GnuCOBOL (cobc)! We'll help show how easy a port (recompile for Linux) is. #cobolworx #COBOL

Glanced at a couple of "COBOL" alerts, one of which mentioned the "risk of replacing legacy COBOL" ... yeah, the risk of replacing anything of any complexity with an entirely new language and no real understanding of the old. Shocking. Big "waterfall" projects have failed 80-90% of the time for over 50 years ... porting COBOL->COBOL is a simpler incremental strategy. You can virtually eliminate the risk by taking low-hanging fruit, proving the approach, and move what makes sense. #COBOL

GCC COBOL (gcobol) performance improvements have cut many common operation roughly in half. Worth another look at the "tip of the spear" (downloads from cobolworx.com). We're at a point where we may be able to drop gcobol-17 to GCC master early and take some time while it cooks for Release. #COBOL #gcobol #cobolworx

Getting down to Tuxedo weight. The false savings of buy versus rent .... at least buying when you're light and needing it when you're not!

The lastest GCC COBOL-17 "master+COBOL" release is up for RHEL10(-ish), Debian 12 & 13 and Ubuntu 22 & 24. Our little indicative functional nuggets with I/O are finally showing the kinds of performance improvements we'd hoped for.

Closed a few more GCC COBOL (#gcobol) bugs today. Getting the ticketing/triage thing sorted. You'd think it was so easy after 27 years of OpenLDAP support but it wasn't.

RT (BestPractical, PERL) may be dated but it's still the best we've found for multi-customer ticket tracking. The gcobol queue is maybe still a mess but it's getting better.

What we need is a few customers taking advantage of free Eval support!

Well fancy that, a COBOL error code "PBKAC" (Problem between Keyboard and Chair"). Oddly gcobol wants you to spell things EXACTLY correctly! Who Knew? And I couldn't see it.

In unrelated news, our Downloads page at the bottom, there are recent development builds available. Much forward movement this August towards GCC COBOL 17!

So the COBOL version of the performance tracker hit a bug!? Watch this space. Sadder.

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 ... https://marty.micro.blog/2026/08/24/i-just-posted-my-thoughts.html

CarolinaCodes! Report: https://marty.micro.blog/2026/08/18/carolinacodes-report.html