Clearly, a lot of the extra time was learning curve about the tooling. Windows is now the portability outlier. Apple’s Mac OS, Linux, and the surviving UNIX platforms are all very similar. Portability is very high. Windows, not so much. A whole and alien toolchain has to be used. And we found performance of the build chain disappointing. In the end, it is built and the packaging being cleaned up. It will likely be posted on our downloads page today (April 30, 2020). All of the other packages are moving there, so the links start going live.

The other problem we had was that all of the “generally available” packages of GnuCOBOL for Windows were far behind the current development release. For better or worse, we have technical dependencies in the Debug Extensions on features very recently introduced. Simon Sobisch added some function to make life easier for Bob Dubner. So we had to produce new, up to date binary packages at that level. And we had to bring gdb up to the level we depend on. gdb 7 doesn’t let us discover the python extension well. Now that it’s been done, we should be able to keep it current with a lot less effort.

On to Mac OS!