The release of GnuCOBOL 3.2 is imminent.
Please help to make this release as good as possible by downloading
and testing this release candidate.
You can find the source downloads as always on gnu.org and on the
SourceForge mirror:
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnucobol/gnucobol-3.2-rc1.tar.lz
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnucobol/gnucobol-3.2-rc1.tar.gz
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnucobol/gnucobol-3.2-rc1.tar.xz
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnucobol/gnucobol-3.2-rc1.tar.bz2
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnucobol/gnucobol-3.2-rc1_win.zip
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/files/gnucobol/3.2/
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 improved run-times 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
See the NEWS file for more details on all of the changes.
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.
Regards,
Simon Sobisch
