Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure what you mean by “When performance is more important than safety, Fortran programs are easier to write and maintain.” The fact that arrays are not based on pointers makes Fortran a much safer language than C. It’s very hard to shoot yourself in the foot with Fortran. It’s fast and safe

View on HN

Fortran offers a better developer experience overall for Numerical applications yes. But it is still very foot shootable as I remember - point a pointer at allocatable and the fun can start. Or make everything inout for convenience and/or performance. But yes, compared to C the defaults are also safer, just don't expect Rust.

It’s very easy to shoot yourself in any body part - just disable array bounds checking, drop modules (which means no function call interface checks) and you’re practically back to C-land in terms of memory safety. Of course, the sensible thing to do is to check interfaces and bounds (at least in debug/test mode).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com