A new language for COBOL workloads, built on Go
Details
- External ID
- 45820676
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A new language for COBOL workloads, built on Go
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Nov. 5, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.0982532751091703
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
We’re building an open-source language layer on top of Go, designed specifically for COBOL-style workloads: Native decimal arithmetic (COBOL-accurate) Record structures and copybook compatibility Batch jobs and transactional orchestration as first-class constructs Sequential / indexed file I/O baked into the runtime Compiles through Go for speed, concurrency, and cloud deployability Think of it as Kotlin for COBOL, or “COBOL on Go” familiar to mainframe engineers, powerful for modern developers.Test Results so far: NIST COBOL-85 validation: 77.61% overall (305/393 tests) NC (Core COBOL): 97.89% (93/95) SM (Statements): 100% (13/13) RL (Relative I/O): 100% (26/26) IF (Intrinsic Functions): 100% (45/45) IC (CALL): 96% (24/25) Compliance tests: 100% passing Acceptance tests: 100% passing
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- cobol-compatible language built on go
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Designing and building a domain-specific language on Go for COBOL legacy workloads requires compiler engineering, exact fixed-point decimal arithmetic, and deep mainframe data format expertise.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires an AST parser and compiler/transpiler to Go bytecode or native Go, strict compliance with COBOL decimal arithmetic (avoiding IEEE 754 float drift), byte-level layout parsers for EBCDIC copybooks/records, and custom ISAM file engine support. This demands specialized compiler engineering talent and deep domain knowledge of legacy mainframe COBOL semantics and financial data interchange formats.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 35 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #35 of 36 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
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- Rustobol · hn · 2026-04-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
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- Lunar, a "fast", memory-efficient Lua 5.1 VM written in Go · hn · 2026-08-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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