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Resurrecting Fortran

ondrejcertik.com

1–10 of 37 posts

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#3
I don't really like the title of this post, due to its implications... you can only resurrect something that is dead. But Fortran is alive and kicking. It is a fundamental language of our technological infrastucture. Millions of people run algorithms every day that are implemented in Fortran! It is also one of the few languages where you can reliably implement numerical algorithms and reason about their efficiency and memory usage.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#4
Fortran's the only obstacle to purchasing M1 for me currently.

A while ago I compared the execution time for some simple matrix arithmetic in rust, fortran (2003 I think), and python/numpy. (as an aside: as far as science is concerned, python without numpy doesn't exist.) Execution times were fairly similar.

What I didn't mention was the pretty-much-optimal fortran and python solutions took maybe a minute to code.

The optimal Rust solution took over a day.

I'll also note intent(in), intent(out) fulfil similar uses to '&' and '&mut'.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#5
What stopped me a while ago was the availability of good free compilers. (the appeal is you could be faster than C for numerical code in Fortran, but I remember vaguely these compilers then would not be cheap)

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#6

Fortran's the only obstacle to purchasing M1 for me currently. A while ago I compared the execution time for some simple matrix arithmetic in rust, fortran (2003 I think), and python/numpy. (as an aside: as far as science is concerned, python without numpy doesn't exist.) Execution times were fairly similar. What I didn't mention was the pretty-much-optimal fortran and python solutions took maybe a minute to code. Th…

Rosetta 2 provides really good performance so you can just run your regular x86 toolchain and executables on it until there’s native support.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#7
post #3

I don't really like the title of this post, due to its implications... you can only resurrect something that is dead. But Fortran is alive and kicking. It is a fundamental language of our technological infrastucture. Millions of people run algorithms every day that are implemented in Fortran! It is also one of the few languages where you can reliably implement numerical algorithms and reason about their efficiency an…

Author here. Yes, some people did not like the title, I didn't realize that it necessary means Fortran was dead. I meant it in the way of "rejuvenate". Fortran was not dead.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#8

Fortran's the only obstacle to purchasing M1 for me currently. A while ago I compared the execution time for some simple matrix arithmetic in rust, fortran (2003 I think), and python/numpy. (as an aside: as far as science is concerned, python without numpy doesn't exist.) Execution times were fairly similar. What I didn't mention was the pretty-much-optimal fortran and python solutions took maybe a minute to code. Th…

LFortran is not ready yet for production usage, but I've been developing it on M1 Macs, everything works (both compiling of LFortran itself, as well as LFortran compiling other codes and interactive usage in Jupyter). It compiles really fast and I really enjoy the experience of M1.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#9
post #5

What stopped me a while ago was the availability of good free compilers. (the appeal is you could be faster than C for numerical code in Fortran, but I remember vaguely these compilers then would not be cheap)

Indeed. Intel Fortran is generally considered one of the best. It was not cheap, but it is now available for free. In general I think there is a huge opportunity for new compilers, and I have started one such effort myself: https://lfortran.org.

Re: Resurrecting Fortran

#10
post #7
post #3

I don't really like the title of this post, due to its implications... you can only resurrect something that is dead. But Fortran is alive and kicking. It is a fundamental language of our technological infrastucture. Millions of people run algorithms every day that are implemented in Fortran! It is also one of the few languages where you can reliably implement numerical algorithms and reason about their efficiency an…

Author here. Yes, some people did not like the title, I didn't realize that it necessary means Fortran was dead. I meant it in the way of "rejuvenate". Fortran was not dead.

“Rejuvenating Fortran” would have been a better title ;-)
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