Four months ago long-time Slashdot reader Shayde tried restoring a 1986 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer.

But now he's gone even further back in time. Shayde writes: In 1984, Apple II's were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The Franklin Ace was chip and ROM compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's downfall.

In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo Pascal in the 80s was like.
Why Turbo Pascal? "Some of my earliest professional programming was done in this environment," Shayde says in the video, "and I was itching to play with it again."

In Communication of the ACM, Google's VP of Education notes how calculators impacted math education — and wonders whether generative AI will have the same impact on CS education: Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the "number sense" to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum: The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described — and the Google VP concedes there may not be.

TechCrunch reports this week that Meta "is denying that it gave Netflix access to users' private messages..." The claim references a court filing that emerged as part of the discovery process in a class-action lawsuit over data privacy practices between a group of consumers and Facebook's parent, Meta. The document alleges that Netflix and Facebook had a "special relationship" and that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser. It also says that Netflix had access to Meta's "Inbox API" that offered the streamer "programmatic access to Facebook's user's private message inboxes...."

Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users' private messages. "Shockingly untrue," Stone wrote on X. "Meta didn't share people's private messages with Netflix. The agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry...."

Beyond Stone's X post, Meta has not provided further comment. However, The New York Times had previously reported in 2018 that Netflix and Spotify could read users' private messages, according to documents it had obtained. Meta denied those claims at the time via a blog post titled "Facts About Facebook's Messaging Partnerships," where it explained that Netflix and Spotify had access to APIs that allowed consumers to message friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix directly from those companies' respective apps. This required the companies to have "write access" to compose messages to friends, "read access" to allow users to read messages back from friends, and "delete access," which meant if you deleted a message from the third-party app, it would also delete the message from Facebook.

"No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct," the blog post stated. In any event, Messenger didn't implement default end-to-end encryption until December 2023, a practice that would have made these sorts of claims a non-starter, as it wouldn't have left room for doubt.

AMD plans to document and open source its Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware for GPUs, giving users more control over Radeon graphics cards. From a report: It's part of a larger effort AMD confirmed earlier this week about making its GPUs more open source at both a software level in respect to the ROCm stack for GPU programming and a hardware level. Details were scarce with this initial announcement, and the only concrete thing it introduced was a GitHub tracker.

However, yesterday AMD divulged more details, specifying that one of the things it would be making open source was the MES firmware for Radeon GPUs. AMD says it will be publishing documentation for MES around the end of May, and will then release the source code some time afterward. For one George Hotz and his startup, Tiny Corp, this is great news. Throughout March, Hotz had agitated for AMD to make MES open source in order to fix issues he was experiencing with his RX 7900 XTX-powered AI server box. He had talked several times to AMD representatives, and even the company's CEO, Lisa Su.

In an interview with Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza, Eurogamer asked about the reputation Roblox has gained and the notion that it was exploitative of young developers, since it takes a cut from work sometimes produced by children. Here's what he had to say: "I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "Like, you can say, 'Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,' right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life. "There's always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratized - and in this case, also with a younger audience," he continued. "I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there's people that are teenagers -- and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.

"For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn't feel like they were exploited! They felt like, 'Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.' So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal."

At this point the PR present during the interview added that "the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18." "And imagine like, the millions of kids that learn how to code every month," Corazza said. "We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right? "I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."

Top business schools are integrating AI into their curricula to prepare students for the changing job market. Schools like the Wharton School, American University's Kogod School of Business, Columbia Business School, and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business are emphasizing AI skills across various courses, WSJ reported Wednesday. Professors are encouraging students to use AI as a tool for generating ideas, preparing for negotiations, and pressure-testing business concepts. However, they stress that human judgment remains crucial in directing AI and making sound decisions. An excerpt from the story: Before, engineers had an edge against business graduates because of their technical expertise, but now M.B.A.s can use AI to compete in that zone, said Robert Bray, who teaches operations management at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. He encourages his students to offload as much work as possible to AI, treating it like "a really proficient intern." Ben Morton, one of Bray's students, is bullish on AI but knows he needs to be able to work without it. He did some coding with ChatGPT for class and wondered: If ChatGPT were down for a week, could he still get work done?

Learning to code with the help of generative AI sped up his development. "I know so much more about programming than I did six months ago," said Morton, 27. "Everyone's capabilities are exponentially increasing." Several professors said they can teach more material with AI's assistance. One said that because AI could solve his lab assignments, he no longer needed much of the class time for those activities. With the extra hours he has students present to their peers on AI innovations. Campus is where students should think through how to use AI responsibly, said Bill Boulding, dean of Duke's Fuqua School. "How do we embrace it? That is the right way to approach this -- we can't stop this," he said. "It has eaten our world. It will eat everyone else's world."

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Analytics platform Databricks has launched an open source foundational large language model, hoping enterprises will opt to use its tools to jump on the LLM bandwagon. The biz, founded around Apache Spark, published a slew of benchmarks claiming its general-purpose LLM -- dubbed DBRX -- beat open source rivals on language understanding, programming, and math. The developer also claimed it beat OpenAI's proprietary GPT-3.5 across the same measures.

DBRX was developed by Mosaic AI, which Databricks acquired for $1.3 billion, and trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud. Databricks claims it optimized DBRX for efficiency with what it calls a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture â" where multiple expert networks or learners divide up a problem. Databricks explained that the model possesses 132 billion parameters, but only 36 billion are active on any one input. Joel Minnick, Databricks marketing vice president, told The Register: "That is a big reason why the model is able to run as efficiently as it does, but also runs blazingly fast. In practical terms, if you use any kind of major chatbots that are out there today, you're probably used to waiting and watching the answer get generated. With DBRX it is near instantaneous."

But the performance of the model itself is not the point for Databricks. The biz is, after all, making DBRX available for free on GitHub and Hugging Face. Databricks is hoping customers use the model as the basis for their own LLMs. If that happens it might improve customer chatbots or internal question answering, while also showing how DBRX was built using Databricks's proprietary tools. Databricks put together the dataset from which DBRX was developed using Apache Spark and Databricks notebooks for data processing, Unity Catalog for data management and governance, and MLflow for experiment tracking.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++. Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language.

Bergstrom said that while Dropbox in 2016 and Figma in 2018 offered early accounts of rewriting code in memory-safe Rust - and doubts about productivity and the language have subsided - concerns have lingered about its reliability and security. "Even six months ago, this was a really tough conversation," he said. "I would go and I would talk to people and they would say, 'Wait, wait you have an `unsafe` keyword. That means we should all write C++ until the heat death of the Universe.'"

But there's been a shift in awareness across the software development ecosystem, Bergstrom argued, about the challenges of using non-memory safe languages. Such messaging is now coming from government authorities in the US and other nations who understand the role software plays in critical infrastructure. The reason is that the majority of security vulnerabilities in large codebases can be traced to memory security bugs. And since Rust code can largely if not totally avoid such problems when properly implemented, memory safety now looks a lot like a national security issue.

"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..." The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting.

Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.

"What a time we live in," writes Phoronix, "where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support..." Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho has sent out the latest patches working on Allocation APIs for the Rust Linux kernel code and also in leveraging those proposed APIs [as] a means of allowing in-place module initialization for Rust kernel modules. Wedson Almeida Filho has been a longtime Rust for Linux contributor going back to his Google engineering days and at Microsoft the past two years has shown no signs of slowing down on the Rust for Linux activities...

The Rust for Linux kernel effort remains a very vibrant effort with a wide variety of organizations contributing, even Microsoft engineers.

Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs.

The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...]

This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.

Longtime Slashdot reader kriston writes: Core PostgreSQL developer Simon Riggs dies in airplane crash in Duxford, England. Riggs was the sole occupant of a Cirrus SR22-T which crashed on March 26 after performing touch-and-go maneuvers. Riggs was responsible for much of the enterprise-level features in PostgreSQL, including point-in-time recovery, synchronous replication, and hot standby. He also was the head of the company 2ndQuadrant that provides PostgreSQL support. Riggs' last community contribution was the presentation of the keynote at PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2023 in Prague, which you can watch on YouTube.

The BBC says it has stopped using AI to promote Doctor Who after receiving complaints from viewers. Deadline reports: The BBC's marketing teams used the tech "as part of a small trial" to help draft some text for two promotional emails and mobile notifications, according to its complaints website, which was intended to highlight Doctor Who programming on the BBC. But the corporation received complaints over the reports that it was using generative AI, it added. "We followed all BBC editorial compliance processes and the final text was verified and signed-off by a member of the marketing team before it was sent," the BBC said. "We have no plans to do this again to promote Doctor Who."

The decision to stop promoting via generative AI represents a u-turn from the BBC, who said at the time of announcement that "generative AI offers a great opportunity to speed up making the extra assets to get more experiments live for more content that we are trying to promote." At the time, the BBC didn't mention that this would be the only time it uses the technology for Doctor Who promotion. Doctor Who will launch in May on the BBC and, for the first time, Disney+. A new trailer was unveiled last week.

"It's a bad day for bugs," joked TechCrunch on Wednesday. "Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code..."

And then the same day, BleepingComputer reported that GitHub "introduced a new AI-powered feature capable of speeding up vulnerability fixes while coding." This feature is in public beta and automatically enabled on all private repositories for GitHub Advanced Security customers. Known as Code Scanning Autofix and powered by GitHub Copilot and CodeQL, it helps deal with over 90% of alert types in JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python... After being toggled on, it provides potential fixes that GitHub claims will likely address more than two-thirds of found vulnerabilities while coding with little or no editing.

"When a vulnerability is discovered in a supported language, fix suggestions will include a natural language explanation of the suggested fix, together with a preview of the code suggestion that the developer can accept, edit, or dismiss," GitHub's Pierre Tempel and Eric Tooley said...

Last month, the company also enabled push protection by default for all public repositories to stop the accidental exposure of secrets like access tokens and API keys when pushing new code. This was a significant issue in 2023, as GitHub users accidentally exposed 12.8 million authentication and sensitive secrets via more than 3 million public repositories throughout the year.
GitHub will continue adding support for more languages, with C# and Go coming next, according to their announcement.

"Our vision for application security is an environment where found means fixed."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Among the amazing features of the in-process analytical database DuckDB, writes software engineer Paul Gross in DuckDB as the New jq, is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats. "Once I learned DuckDB could read JSON files directly into memory," Gross explains, "I realized that I could use it for many of the things where I'm currently using jq. In contrast to the complicated and custom jq syntax, I'm very familiar with SQL and use it almost daily."

The stark difference of the two programming approaches to the same problem — terse-but-cryptic jq vs. more-straightforward-to-most SQL — also raises some interesting questions: Will the use of Generative AI coding assistants more firmly entrench the status quo of the existing programming paradigms on whose codebases it's been trained? Or could it help bootstrap the acceptance of new, more approachable programming paradigms?

Had something like ChatGPT been around back in the Programming Windows 95 days, might people have been content to use Copilot to generate reams of difficult-to-maintain-and-enhance Windows C code using models trained on the existing codebases instead of exploring easier approaches to Windows programming like Visual BASIC?

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple's M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday. From a report: The flaw -- a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols -- can't be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

The threat resides in the chips' data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it's actually needed, the DMP, as the feature is abbreviated, reduces latency between the main memory and the CPU, a common bottleneck in modern computing. DMPs are a relatively new phenomenon found only in M-series chips and Intel's 13th-generation Raptor Lake microarchitecture, although older forms of prefetchers have been common for years. Security experts have long known that classical prefetchers open a side channel that malicious processes can probe to obtain secret key material from cryptographic operations. This vulnerability is the result of the prefetchers making predictions based on previous access patterns, which can create changes in state that attackers can exploit to leak information. In response, cryptographic engineers have devised constant-time programming, an approach that ensures that all operations take the same amount of time to complete, regardless of their operands. It does this by keeping code free of secret-dependent memory accesses or structures.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI's generative AI models, onstage at the company's first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to "accomplish all sorts of tasks" -- from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers. "Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you," Altman said. "You can build a GPT ... for almost anything." He wasn't kidding about the anything part.

TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI's official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI's moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup has defended the widely used programming language in response to a Biden administration report that calls on developers to use memory-safe languages and avoid using vulnerable ones such as C++ and C. In a March 15 response to an inquiry from InfoWorld, Stroustrup pointed out strengths of C++, which was designed in 1979. "I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees," Stroustrup said. "On the other hand, they seem to have realized that a programming language is just one part of a tool chain, so that improved tools and development processes are essential."

Safety improvement always has been a goal of C++ development efforts, Stroustrup stressed. "Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution. Just compare the K&R C language with the earliest C++, and the early C++ with contemporary C++. My CppCon 2023 keynote outlines that evolution," he said. "Much quality C++ is written using techniques based on RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), containers, and resource management pointers rather than conventional C-style pointer messes." Stroustrup cited a number of efforts to improve C++ safety. "There are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples' notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that," he said. "Profiles is a framework for specifying what guarantees a piece of code requires and enable implementations to verify them. There are documents describing that on the committee's website -- look for WG21 -- and more are coming. However, some of us are not in a mood to wait for the committee's necessarily slow progress."

Profiles, Stroustrup said, "is a framework that allows us to incrementally improve guarantees -- e.g., to eliminate most range errors relatively soon -- and to gradually introduce guarantees into large code bases through local static analysis and minimal run-time checks. My long-term aim for C++ is and has been for C++ to offer type and resource safety when and where needed. Maybe the current push for memory safety -- a subset of the guarantees I want -- will prove helpful to my efforts, which are shared by many in the C++ standards committee." Stroustrup previously defended the safety of C++ against the NSA, which recommended using memory-safe languages instead of C++ and C in a November 2022 bulletin.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last October, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org publicly called out Indiana in its 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, advising the Hoosier state it needed to heed Code.org's new policy recommendation and "adopt a graduation requirement for all high school students in computer science." Having already joined 49 other Governors who signed a Code.org-organized compact calling for increased K-12 CS education in his state after coming under pressure from hundreds of the nation's tech, business, and nonprofit leaders, Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb apparently didn't need much convincing. "We must prepare our students for a digitally driven world by requiring Computer Science to graduate from high school," Holcomb proclaimed in his January State of the State Address. Two months later -- following Microsoft-applauded testimony for legislation to make it so by Code.org partners College Board and Nextech (the Indiana Code.org Regional Partner which is also paid by the Indiana Dept. of Education to prepare educators to teach K-12 CS, including Code.org's curriculum) -- Holcomb on Wednesday signed House Bill 1243 into law, making CS a HS graduation requirement. The IndyStar reports students beginning with the Class of 2029 will be required to take a computer science class that must include instruction in algorithms and programming, computing systems, data and analysis, impacts of computing and networks and the internet.

The new law is not Holcomb's first foray into K-12 CS education. Back in 2017, Holcomb and Indiana struck a deal giving Infosys (a big Code.org donor) the largest state incentive package ever -- $31M to bring 2,000 tech employees to Central Indiana — that also promised to make Indiana kids more CS savvy through the Infosys Foundation USA, headed at the time by Vandana Sikka, a Code.org Board member and wife of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Following the announcement of the now-stalled deal, Holcomb led a delegation to Silicon Valley where he and Indiana University (IU) President Michael McRobbie joined Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on a Thought Leader panel at the Infosys Confluence 2017 conference to discuss Preparing America for Tomorrow. At the accompanying Infosys Crossroads 2017 CS education conference, speakers included Sikka's wife Vandana, McRobbie's wife Laurie Burns McRobbie, Nextech President and co-CEO Karen Jung, Code.org execs, and additional IU educators. Later that year, IU 'First Lady' Laurie Burns McRobbie announced that Indiana would offer the IU Bloomington campus as a venue for Infosys Foundation USA's inaugural Pathfinders Summer Institute, a national event for K-12 teacher education in CS that offered professional development from Code.org and Nextech, as well as an unusual circumvent-your-school's-approval-and-name-your-own-stipend funding arrangement for teachers via an Infosys partnership with the NSF and DonorsChoose that was unveiled at the White House.

And that, Schoolhouse Rock Fans, is one more example of how Microsoft's National Talent Strategy is becoming Code.org-celebrated K-12 CS state laws!

An anonymous reader shared this report: After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL "has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments," said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology. GnuCOBOL turns COBOL source code into executable applications. It is very cross-platform, running Linux, BSD, many proprietary Unixes, macOS, and Windows, even Android. And the latest version, v.32, is being used in many commercial settings...

Sobisch noted that the GnuCOBOL is seeing a lot of commercial deployments, such as for banking back-end apps, many of which are being migrated from Micro Focus, with users reporting performance improvements as a result. The French DGFIP federal agency moved from a GCOS mainframe to GnuCOBOL, with the help of Le Fessant's firm.

Originally called OpenCOBOL, the project was started in 2002 and renamed GnuCOBOL in 2013. In the past three years, it has received attention from 13 contributors with 460 commits. Most Linux package managers have a copy of GnuCOBOL for the program for downloading... It can compile to C code (C89+), making it extremely portable, from mainframes to Raspberry Pi's, Sobisch said...

Also new is SuperBOL, a development studio for GnuCOBOL developed by Le Fessant's OCamlPro. It runs as a VSCode Extension and features a full COBOL processor (written in OCaml).