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Comment by BooneJS | Hacker News Reader

FORTRAN can be compiled on ARM Macs, but only commercially for now. https://www.nag.com/news/first-fortran-compiler-apple-silico...

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I am probably the last person to talk about the difference between fortran version, but isn't the linked compiler for FORTRAN 2003 and 2008, whereas R needs a FORTRAN 90 compiler?

Which means they support everything from Fortran 90 and then some.

Fortran versions are additive. I.e. F03 is a strict superset of F90 and thus an F08 compiler can do F03 and F90

Only roughly additive. Some obsolete features have been dropped, though that doesn't mean compilers have dropped them.

Can the R project use that compiler to build binaries and then upload the release to the public?

GCC/gfortran should soon follow, no?

The current effort is done with this out of tree repository: https://github.com/iains/gcc-darwin-arm64

Which supports macOS on Apple Silicon quite well, hopefully will be merged soon to mainline GCC.

It is possible that Apple Inc will forcefully eliminate GCC from their platforms, replaced with Clang/LLVM and other non-GPL tools only.

No, it really isn't.

They're certainly well on their way to remove all GPL code from macOS itself if they haven't yet, but there's not much they can do to prevent you from installing GPL software yourself (nor much of a motivation to do so for that matter).

MacOS already doesn’t include GCC. The GCC command on MacOS is an alias for Clang unless you install gcc separately (unless there is a hidden GCC install I’m unaware of).

Soon and soon. Problem is that macOS/ARM64 has a new ABI [1], and nobody has implemented that in GCC. A couple of people are working on it apparently on their own time, but it's a fairly significant undertaking. Might be ready for GCC 11 which if history is a guide should be released in spring 2021. Or then it might not be ready.

[1] Why not use the standard ARM64 ABI as published by ARM? Well shits and giggles.

It’s the same as the iOS ABI.

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