I’m imagining an open source crate that:
• Generates Rust structs from COBOL copybooks.
• Shows side-by-side code for common patterns.
• Includes utilities for fixed-width parsing, EBCDIC, and decimal math.
• Lets you verify that Rust output matches the original COBOL.
Not a migration factory — more of a Rosetta Stone for devs who need to read, rewrite, or replace COBOL incrementally.
Would this be useful in the real world ? I know there are a lot of enterprise tools that convert code to Java.
That’s completely out of my league, but something I would be interested to pursue.