CobolCraft: a Minecraft server written in COBOL

COBOL, your mother’s and grandmother’s programming language, is still in relatively wide use today, and with the initial batches of COBOL programmers retiring and, well, going away, there’s a market out there for younger people to learn COBOL and gain some serious job security in stable, but perhaps boring market segments. One of the things you would not associate with COBOL, however, is gaming – but it turns out it can be used for that, too.

CobolCraft is a Minecraft server written in, you guessed it, COBOL. It was developed using GnuCOBOL, and only works on Linux – Windows and macOS are not supported, but it can be run using Electron for developers, otherwise known as Docker. It’s only compatible with the latest release of Minecraft at the time of CobolCraft’s development, version 1.21.4, and a few more complex blocks with states are not yet supported because of how difficult it is to program those using COBOL.

CobolCraft’s creator, Fabian Meyer, explains why he started this project:

Well, there are quite a lot of rumors and stigma surrounding COBOL. This intrigued me to find out more about this language, which is best done with some sort of project, in my opinion. You heard right – I had no prior COBOL experience going into this.

Writing a Minecraft server was perhaps not the best idea for a first COBOL project, since COBOL is intended for business applications, not low-level data manipulation (bits and bytes) which the Minecraft protocol needs lots of. However, quitting before having a working prototype was not on the table! A lot of this functionality had to be implemented completely from scratch, but with some clever programming, data encoding and decoding is not just fully working, but also quite performant.

↫ Fabian Meyer

I don’t know much about programming, but I do grasp that this is a pretty crazy thing to do, and quite the achievement to get working this well, too. Do note that this isn’t a complete implementation of the Minecraft server, with certain more complex blocks not working, and things like a lighting engine not being made yet either. This doesn’t detract from the achievement, but it does mean you won’t be playing regular Minecraft with this for a while yet – if ever, if this remains a fun hobby project for its creator.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/141411/cobolcraft-a-minecraft-server-written-in-cobol/