Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

Fortran is hardly dead, but neither is it is well.

On the plus side, Fortran has more actively developed implementations than any other language. It is critical to some of the most important applications that exist. One can write code in the portable subset of Fortran and extract very high performance from very expensive HPC systems over many generations of processor and systems architecture.

On the down side, advancement of the language has become moribund -- the last major standard was in 2008 and the two revisions since then have been minor. The standards committee creates new features from whole cloth without prototyping them, and without fixing the bugs in the spec when bugs are discovered eventually by implementors. There has been no standard public test suite since F'77, so implementations vary. There are highly portable features that are not standard and there are standard features now that are not portable.

I'm working hard to try to improve this situation on the compiler side.

> the last major standard was in 2008 and the two revisions since then have been minor.

For me this is a measure of maturity. Changing a language every year is a sign of immaturity.

I am not complaining about the cadence of standards. It is the continued absence of critical modern programming features that has rendered the standard committee irrelevant.

> Fortran has more actively developed implementations than any other language

Respectfully, I'm pretty sceptical of this. Do you have a source?

I'd expect C to easily beat Fortran here. There's a C compiler (or several) for essentially every platform, as C is king for embedded work.

Good point, and thanks for noting it. I was only thinking of independent actively developed production compilers in my space of expertise, where C/C++ seems to be down to GNU, Clang, and EDG-based compilers, while Fortran still has at least GNU, Intel, nvfortran, LLVM Flang, NAG, and XLF. A decent C89 compiler for a single target is only about a 10K LOC project and there must be more than a few of them out there.

Sounds like you're doing Gods work for mere mortals. How can we support that work?

Fortran needs multiple healthy independent open-source implementations for production use. If you have the skill and inclination, please contribute fixes and features and bug reports and tests to GNU Fortran and LLVM Flang.

Secondarily, Fortran could benefit from modern educational materials, public test suites, effective responses to misinformation, and better discussion sites.

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