In addition to the COBOL language front-end being merged this week for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release, another notable change also landed this week… Deprecating ESA/390 architecture support in preparation for its eventual removal.
ESA/390 as IBM’s last 32-bit mainframe architecture is now deprecated by the GNU Compiler Collection in preparation for its eventual removal. Those carrying on in the lineage are encouraged to use the 64-bit IBM z/Architecture.
Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus made the deprecation and commented:
“Deprecate support for the ESA/390 architecture which will be eventually removed, and encourage the usage of the z/Architecture instead.
Furthermore, default for -m31 to -mzarch whereas previously we defaulted to -mesa.”
ESA/390 was introduced back in 1990 while z/Architecture is already 25 years old. The z/Architecture does retain backwards compatibility with the ESA/390 architecture.
With this ESA/390 deprecation going into GCC 15, it’s possible the ESA/390 compiler support could be removed in its entirety for the GCC 16 compiler release due out next year.