This week, another major milestone in the world of running Minecraft in unexpected ways has been achieved – this time, thanks to the open source CobolCraft project, we A version of the Minecraft server, with most of its functionality intact, running on GnuCOBOLderived from the pre-x86 COBOL coding language, originally standardized in 1968 and designed in 1959.
COBOL has its roots in a Department of Defense-funded effort to create a highly readable coding language optimized for business workloads and optimized for cross-platform and cross-architecture stability and performance. Newer languages are obviously more powerful and diverse, but updates to COBOL over time have slowly increased the modern usability of this legacy language, and CobolCraft highlights the breadth of use of COBOL.
Perhaps the biggest advancement in modern COBOL updates is the COBOL 2002 version of the standard—according to International Business Machines CorporationAccording to reports, this iteration adds some object-oriented features and other “advanced programming paradigms” to the language to improve compatibility with the current generation. This traditional programming language can still be seen in modern mainframes and is so popular in the private and government sectors that COBOL encoders remain in high demand It is at the peak of the unemployment wave in 2020.
The COBOL version used by CobolCraft, GnuCOBOL, is a Linux-oriented version of COBOL written in C (with a C++ branch) based on the COBOL 2014 standard. This should mean that those more critical interoperability features are already intact in the version of COBOL used here, which should help CobolCraft do most of the things needed to run a Minecraft server without issue.
According to official introduction GitHub pagemost core features are “already working”. These include unlimited terrain generation, persistent world and player profiles, existing world import support, multiplayer for up to 10 players, breaking and placing blocks, block interaction, and typical multiplayer features such as chat, whitelisting, console Command and display ping/server status.
The CobolCraft documentation states that “Blocks with multiple states, orientations, or interactive blocks require a significant amount of specialized code to make them function properly,” but that “some blocks are supported.”
The most basic interactive features such as torches, boards, doors, trapdoors, and beds are fully functional. However, other objects only function in a limited form, such as non-interactive buttons, which represent the largest technological achievements within Building Minecraft through redstone is not feasible here. This isn’t exactly standard gameplay, though, so many players can still have a good experience without the features required to make a functional calculator or PC in Minecraft.