Announcing the development of Otterkit COBOL

[KTSnowy]

Today I'm announcing the development of Otterkit COBOL, a new free and open-source COBOL compiler that targets the dotnet runtime (more specifically, C#) and will run on macOS, Linux and Windows. We've been developing it for the past 3 months and I'm more confident in announcing its existence now, and I'm also really confident that with a little bit of work we could get a modern production-ready COBOL compiler that is free and open for everyone.

Currently the architecture for this compiler is split into the compiler itself and the runtime library. The runtime library being separate from the compiler also allows to more easily add more languages to the it, only requiring porting the runtime library and reuse some of the codegen methods (and a polyglot COBOL compiler would be pretty funny in my opinion and could be a fun thing to work on in the future. Finally fulfilling COBOL's purpose of being a truly portable "common business language").

Right now, it can't compile a full COBOL program yet, it's still missing the codegen which is something that I'm actively working on. BUT the foundation is already there, and the runtime library already implements some of the intrinsic functions and statements, and also correctly implements the COBOL datatypes and their PICTURE behavior, which in my opinion is one of the hardest things to implement correctly.

There's a discussions tab on this GitHub organization, feel free to ask anything there or suggest any changes and fixes if you find anything broken. Feel free to tag me ( @KTSnowy ) in a discussion so that I can read it and reply to it earlier.

The compiler itself lives in the Otterkit repo:
https://github.com/otterkit/otterkit

And the runtime library lives in the Libotterkit repo:
https://github.com/otterkit/libotterkit

Both are licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.