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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I heard COBOL is used a lot in large (governmental) organizations. What are the compilers commonly in use in those places? Is this GNU impl commonly seen there?

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One of the big vendors is MicroFocus.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home

Their variant of COBOL has a number of extensions beyond the regular standard in GnuCOBOL. One that springs to mind is around data serialisation and file formatting.

They also implemented an API layer for access from more modern stacks.

Incidentally, if you're interested in getting into software development, I believe the DWP in the UK are still currently taking on apprentices to work on the COBOL-based systems in the department - I think they also get training in other languages too - perhaps JS, Ruby or Python?

Large organizations you speak of that use COBOL are mostly insurance and finance megacorps, and some government, that were (and some still are) deep in the pockets of various mainframe vendors. Vendors distributed their own compilers with some tweaks to the language, like IBM.

It's extremely rare to see FOSS in such legacy systems. The push for FOSS in large corporations has been coming from the for newer stacks, designed by newer developers.

I reckoned. But I was interested what compilers this one competes against.

DIGITAL, IBM and HP typically supplied COBOL compilers with their relevant big iron systems and a lot of time the actual code base will be tied so closely to a greater framework provided by/for those platforms that just being able to compile COBOL on an different environment is the least part of the migration process.

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