Expectations around COBOL platform support

[Matthew R. Wilson]

On 04.02.2025 00:44, Sam James wrote:
>"Matthew R. Wilson" <mwilson@mattwilson.org> writes:
>> With the new COBOL support merged into the source of the upcoming GCC 15
>> release, I have a question around GCC's policy for supporting different
>> architectures. In short, is the COBOL support initally only targeting
>> x86 and ARM, or by the time GCC 15 releases should it support all
>> architectures that it builds for?
>>
>> I built from the current git master branch on a ppc64le Linux box, with
>> --enable-languages=c,c++,cobol, and everything built successfully and
>> produced a gcobol binary. But when using gcobol, it fails with an ICE:
>>
>> [bug details elided]
>>
>> I saw somewhere when I was looking at the commits that merged the COBOL
>> work in that it was only tested on x86 and ARM so far.
>
>See https://gcc.gnu.org/PR119308

Ah, yes, thank you, that's the same behavior.

I searched for bugs when I first hit this earlier this month, but
haven't gotten around to following up until today. Good to see folks are
already jumping on it!

>The original stance of the COBOL maintainers was that they're only
>really interested in arm64 + x86_64, at least at first(?).
>
>I think we've succeeded in somewhat changing their mind, or at least in
>convincing them to accept changes that make porting to other targets
>easier (some of this is free while porting to GCC conventions and so on).

That's good -- given the broad set of platforms GCC is used on, adding a
language such as COBOL for only x86_64 and arm64 seems like it wouldn't
be quite ready for merging into a release yet. (I know...I need to be
dragged kicking and screaming into the Real World where x86_64 and arm64
covers the vast majority of what people care about these days.)

Thank you,
Matthew