Hi,
I don't know if anyone uses GOptical (as the last post to this mailing list was 2 years ago!), but in case anyone is interested, I have got it to complile on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS.
I had to make a few changes, and for some reason the goptical_design test does not compile, but the examples do, so my fixes are not perfect - but they should be enough for me to see what Goptical does.
I don't have access to the source code repository, so I have put my copy on github:
You can see from the commits what I had to change.
Regards
Graham.