GnuCOBOL 3.2 Release Candidate

The changes from GnuCOBOL 3.1 to 3.2 are huge but the highlights are:

• improved dialect handling including changed defaults to better match the selected dialect (see NEWS if you compile with any -std to know more about the implications), a complete new dialect GCOS and support for more COBOL statements, intrinsic functions and syntax from both "old" and new dialects

• highly reduced run-time for several statements, along with less memory usage, especially if runtime checks are enabled

• fileio changes to support LINE-SEQUENTIAL per COBOL2023 and runtime options to change the way files are handled, see NEWS and runtime.cfg

• improvements for source-level debugging via GDB and coredump support

• improvements for reproducible builds

GnuCOBOL 3.x keeps full compatibility to GnuCOBOL 2.2, you can therefore use old COBOL modules without recompile, if needed (although with less performance benefits).

If no problems are found, GnuCOBOL 3.2.0 should be released around 2023-02-03. It is expected that both the documentation and the internal testsuite is extended until then, along with some msgid updates.

See the NEWS file for more details on all of the changes or even the full commit ChangeLog.