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Fortran on WebAssembly

gws.phd

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Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#11

Post by forgotpwd16 »

certik wrote: post #7
andsoitis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weird that it doesn't go into LFortran more, they even have an excellent online and mindblowing WASM example. They write: The LFortran compiler has made great strides over the last few years. In 2020, it was missing a lot of features and only supported a very small subset of Fortran. Now it now supports a much wider range of language features and can be used to compile a reasonable amount of Fortran code. It can ev…

The author of LFortran here. The demo at https://dev.lfortran.org uses our direct WASM backend that does not use LLVM. It is currently more limited, and indeed, we currently do not support the cubic power x**3 there, only square power x**2. Our most advanced backend is LLVM, and that of course supports x**3 and a very wide subset of Fortran (such as 60% of all SciPy packages fully compile and all SciPy tests pass). H…

Grats for the amazing work! LFortran is very cool project.

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#12

Post by coldcode »

I wish I had kept my Fortran 78 code from 1981/82 to see if I could get it to run on this. It was a Jovial programming language source code formatter. Not exactly what you should use Fortran for, but that's the only choice I had.

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#13

Post by superjan »

certik wrote: post #7
andsoitis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weird that it doesn't go into LFortran more, they even have an excellent online and mindblowing WASM example. They write: The LFortran compiler has made great strides over the last few years. In 2020, it was missing a lot of features and only supported a very small subset of Fortran. Now it now supports a much wider range of language features and can be used to compile a reasonable amount of Fortran code. It can ev…

The author of LFortran here. The demo at https://dev.lfortran.org uses our direct WASM backend that does not use LLVM. It is currently more limited, and indeed, we currently do not support the cubic power x**3 there, only square power x**2. Our most advanced backend is LLVM, and that of course supports x**3 and a very wide subset of Fortran (such as 60% of all SciPy packages fully compile and all SciPy tests pass). H…

Just curious but what is keeping you from compiling x*3?

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#14

Post by wch »

A little context: this dive into Fortran is part of the excellent work George has been doing on WebR, to get R running in the browser. The R sources contain a fair bit of Fortran code, and I believe WebR originally used f2c to compile the Fortran to C first, before compiling that to wasm.

With the patches to LLVM Flang, WebR can be built with a real Fortran compiler.

I think George didn't want to say it directly in the blog post, but he has said that he's hoping that Flang would take his patches or implement better ones. That would be a win-win -- these patches wouldn't need to be maintained separately, and since unmodified Flang would be able to compile to wasm, it would benefit other projects out there that use Fortran.

https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#15

Post by pklausler »

wch wrote: post #14

A little context: this dive into Fortran is part of the excellent work George has been doing on WebR, to get R running in the browser. The R sources contain a fair bit of Fortran code, and I believe WebR originally used f2c to compile the Fortran to C first, before compiling that to wasm. With the patches to LLVM Flang, WebR can be built with a real Fortran compiler. I think George didn't want to say it directly in t…

Pull requests are always welcome (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project), and one can contact the general LLVM Fortran development community (https://discourse.llvm.org/c/subprojects/flang/33) for help. I am focused on things needed to complete development for Nvidia's Fortran product and don't have any time left for things like this, myself.

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#16

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

I am pretty ignorant of Web Assembly development.

Does Web Assembly have anything to offer me today as a consumer? Or is all of this still setting the groundwork for a future where programs are truly portable?

I have heard some rumblings that the WA machinery makes it easier to restrict access (network, files) but I do not know if those are theoretical or implemented today.

Re: Fortran on WebAssembly

#20

Post by kevingadd »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #16

I am pretty ignorant of Web Assembly development. Does Web Assembly have anything to offer me today as a consumer? Or is all of this still setting the groundwork for a future where programs are truly portable? I have heard some rumblings that the WA machinery makes it easier to restrict access (network, files) but I do not know if those are theoretical or implemented today.

As a developer or someone shipping products, if you want robust sandboxing, WASM is probably the best option available to you right now. And there are ways to deploy it or cross-compile it for most targets.
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