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Comment by marvel_boy | Hacker News Reader

From the article: >Clang, the default compiler for OS X, supports only C, C++ and >Objective-C. If you are interested in a modern Fortran >compiler,...

  Mmm, no we are not interested

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Like it or not, there still exist many important and frequently used programs which are only written in fortran. People absolutely should be interested in maintaining a fortran compiler.

Yeah, there's little reason to write new code in Fortran, but there's definitely a need for current binaries of all those existing mature and well-designed Fortran libraries.

I work with reservoir modelling, and it continues to amaze me that everyone coming from non-CS fields seem to have programmed solely in Fortran. Besides, I believe the Intel Fortran compiler is extremely fast. I wouldn't say there's no reason to write new programs in Fortran.

I find it's much easier to write code that uses multidimensional arrays in Fortan than almost any other language.

Sure, i/o isn't as nice and don't try to do anything fancy with strings, but for numbers it's hard to beat.

BLAS and LAPACK?

C versions of those ship pre-built on OS X.

Are you sure that's not just a C interface to the Fortran library?

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/ : "LAPACK is written in Fortran 90 and provides routines for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, least-squares solutions of linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, and singular value problems."

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapacke.html : "The LAPACKE C Interface to LAPACK"

You might be right, at least for parts of LAPACK. I think Apple's libraries are based on ATLAS, where the BLAS part and some of LAPACK is written in C.

There is a reason why these things are still written in FORTRAN: they run much faster than C-based versions. Some people say that C++ with templates can get closer to FORTRAN, but even if that is true, creating libraries for non-C++ languages from C++ template-based code is very complicated.

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