UK Enterprises Guide to Migrating COBOL Systems to Go in 2026

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A technical guide published on DEV Community outlines how UK enterprises can migrate legacy COBOL systems to the Go programming language, highlighting its appeal for organisations that prioritise simplicity, fast compilation, and single-binary deployment over large enterprise frameworks. Go's built-in concurrency model is presented as a natural fit for modernising COBOL's sequential batch processing into parallel workloads. A critical planning concern flagged in the guide is Go's lack of a native decimal type, meaning COBOL financial fields default to float64, which can introduce rounding errors unless a dedicated decimal library is used. The guide identifies three main migration approaches — automated conversion, parallel rewrite, and incremental strangler-fig migration — each carrying different risk and cost profiles. A mid-size migration is estimated to cost between £200,000 and £800,000 and typically takes one to two years to complete.

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