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damian2000

Fortran 77 was the language I used in my first job in 92 on DOS and Unix. Can't see the benefits over other languages like C, Go, Python though. Unless you've got some specific high performance floating point ops requirements?

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Quite a few scientists and engineers have those requirements. I wouldn't choose it for writing a web server or text processing, but Fortran is actually a pretty nice language for dealing with numbers and arrays. It also has decades' worth of well-tested numerical libraries, which can be very subtle and hard to get right.

Thanks to the magic of computer science, we can package up a lot of those libraries for use with other languages as well.

Sort of, but we haven't figured out how to make language boundaries disappear. For example, row- vs. column-major ordering of arrays is an eternal pain when communicating between C and Fortran.

Numpy, R, Matlab, etc. are good scripting languages for a lot of Fortran, but if you ever need to peek under the hood...

Not in C++, thanks to the power of user defined types.

From:

https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/304/c-vs-fortran...

"Sorry for digging up an old thread but it seems that even in 2015, Fortran is being used a lot.

I just came across this (alternate link) list which basically is a list of 13 codes approved by DOE's OCLF facility to run on the 300-petaFLOPS Summit machine which will be made available to researchers in 2018. I tried to find the main language used for the code (based on a quick google search) and here is what I found:

XGC Fortran

SPECFEM Fortran

ACME Fortran (Bunch of climate codes)

DIRAC Fortran (Mostly)

FLASH Fortran

GTC Fortran

HACC C/C++

LS-DALTON Fortran (some C)

NAMD C/C++

NUCCOR Fortran

NWCHEM Fortran

QMCPACK C++

RAPTOR Fortran"

Note: QMCPACK is written in C++ but depends on LAPACK which is again Fortran.

Another example I've given before is the usage statistics for the UK "tier 1" system: //www.archer.ac.uk/status/codes/. Six of the top ten are Fortran that month (I think -- I'm not positive about NEMO). That's probably vaguely representative of typical general purpose HPC systems.

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