Of WebAssembly (and COBOL)

The running joke at the office is that I'm the only one old enough to ever take COBOL classes. My younger colleagues therefor insist on feeding me bits of COBOL news. I guess I might as well share!

Of course the recent announcement by CloudFlare that they support COBOL on their WebAssembly serverless platform via CobWeb sure helped. (Make sure to review Conway's Life in COBOL running inside the browser on that post.)

I might have started it off by mentioning that while looking into what is lacking in WebAssembly to support Garbage Collected, dynamically typed languages such as Scheme or JavaScript, I looked back into DukTape (which would do the job, but is missing on recent JS developments). The fun bit of course was integration between DukTape and GnuCOBOL.

In the same vein, the last tidbit I received was (similarly to what DukTape and GnuCOBOL have been doing for awhile) the announcement of a similar functionality on GraalVM.

Of course everyone at the office still hasn't noticed that the language was first created over a decade before I was born, so I can only assume this will keep coming! 😂