Ask HN: Resources for getting started with modern Fortran? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Resources for getting started with modern Fortran?

10 pointstt567x6 comments

Hey! I've been doing scientific computing in Python&co (numpy, torch etc.) for awhile now. Realizing that many things deep down remain some sort of Fortran, I'd like to learn more about this final layer. I see there are many standards etc., which makes one wonder, is there a go-to list of resources for newcomers targeting modern scientific Fortran? Thanks!

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The canonical reference is "Modern Fortran Explained: Incorporating Fortran 2018" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen. It is accurate but terse. More pedagogical but deliberately less complete (focusing on modern Fortran) is "Modern Fortran: Building efficient parallel applications" by Curcic. Many tutorials are listed at the Fortran Wiki https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Tutorials . Fortran Discourse https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/ is an active forum.

How much modern Fortran is out there and what are people doing with modern Fortran?

On the rare occasions I see jobs seeking people with Fortran knowledge it tends to be in scientific fields where they wants a scientist who can muck around with legacy code.

Every year the amount of Fortan in use reduces by 50%. (it gets' turned into C, or Python)

There will still be work in Fortan in 2050. It will never completely die.

>>> is there a go-to list of resources for newcomers targeting modern scientific Fortran?

There needs to be! Silo'd in DoE labs, it's retiring with the greybeards ;)

Learning from NVidia (same with vulkan). Target: jetson real-time image analysis.

But it's so fast on device I would host production services in multi-gpu fortran without reservation (if i had wall street level math loads + gpu cluster):

https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2013/presentations/S30...

https://fortran-lang.org/learn/

https://researchcomputing.princeton.edu/education/external-o...

I found these two, amongst others, by googling "learning modern fortran"

Maybe this book https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Fortran-Building-Efficient-App... could help?

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