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Comment by alexott | Hacker News Reader

But when it comes to speed, Fortran is very hard to beat, especially with specialized compilers

Which are not free for the most part, right?

As of 2019, the speed argument is mostly academic though. IMO. Few people do cosmo simulations on a daily basis to really care about this.

Yes but how many of the people who these slides were designed for are people doing cosmos simulations? That's the relevant quantity. It's especially funny because the author's area of research is in cosmos simulations. :-)

A lot? I would guess the slides are meant for advanced undergrads or first year grad students in a physics program. ee how the math-y parts of the slides are pretty sophisticated (e.g., bessel functions) even though the programming part is pretty simple?

Of course "a lot" is the answer. That is precisely my point: for the audience of these slides, speed does matter. :)

My bad--I parsed that as sarcasm!

When I did this myself (around 20 years ago), computer time was expensive, and any speed up helped

Yea, but people still do all kinds of other numerical work in Fortran like Power Systems and it is much easier to read than the new C++ replacements I've seen.

Check out GFortran, it's 100% free as part of the GNU project. I believe the Intel Fortran compiler is also free (as in money, maybe not as in freedom). The speed argument does matter too--how many high frequency trading/fintech/big data/banking/engineering companies are built, at some point in the stack, on high-speed libraries written in Fortran? I don't know any numbers, but any company that uses numpy is transitively also using Fortran in their stack.

I believe the Intel Fortran compiler is also free

It's only free for students and educational uses. Not for any commercial or non-education research use.

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