The State of Fortran
arxiv.org
The State of Fortran
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: The State of Fortran
#2Please note there's been some uptick in the intensity of discussion on generics lately [0].
Generics are necessary to bring performant data structures to Fortran, and yet they are nowhere near Go's generics.
For the usual naysayers doubting Fortran's place in a modern world: whenever you are reading or watching a weather forecast, that's decades of Fortran staring at you. Whenever you drive past a nuclear power plant, or an airbase with 'igloos', remember that nuclear safety codes run on Fortran.
Re: The State of Fortran
#3Are things like higher order functions and closures relevant features for Fortran programmers? This is an open-ended question.
[edit] Just to be clear, I don't think Fortran has these.
Re: The State of Fortran
#4What kind of editor support does Fortran have? I think a language is more than just a language as such, and the surrounding environment is at least as important if not more. I've used things like Mathematica, RStudio and Matlab, as well as Java IDEs, and these make all the difference.
Re: The State of Fortran
#5Modern Fortran is beautiful and I love coding in it.
However, my understanding is that its main focus is on array computations. Now with hierarchical data structures and graphs becoming ever pervasive, I wonder if Fortran will ever try to compete in this space (when these higher-order concepts are integrated into domains of Fortran's past dominance in numerical simulation).
Re: The State of Fortran
#6No post body was provided.
Re: The State of Fortran
#7Modern Fortran is beautiful and I love coding in it. However, my understanding is that its main focus is on array computations. Now with hierarchical data structures and graphs becoming ever pervasive, I wonder if Fortran will ever try to compete in this space (when these higher-order concepts are integrated into domains of Fortran's past dominance in numerical simulation).
Graphs can certainly be modelled as matrices over different kinds of scalars. But I'm not sure how relevant this is to your use case.
Re: The State of Fortran
#8Modern Fortran is beautiful and I love coding in it. However, my understanding is that its main focus is on array computations. Now with hierarchical data structures and graphs becoming ever pervasive, I wonder if Fortran will ever try to compete in this space (when these higher-order concepts are integrated into domains of Fortran's past dominance in numerical simulation).
Hierarchical data structures are bad for CPU caches, see, for example, references in [1] how various data-oriented programming techniques try to avoid them.
From that point of view Fortran may be even more relevant for high-performance computing now than even 10 years ago.
Re: The State of Fortran
#9No post body was provided.
Re: The State of Fortran
#10What kind of editor support does Fortran have? I think a language is more than just a language as such, and the surrounding environment is at least as important if not more. I've used things like Mathematica, RStudio and Matlab, as well as Java IDEs, and these make all the difference.
Good timing for your question as there is a poll going on at the moment about editors used with Fortran, on the Fortran Lang community Discourse here: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/code-editors-ides-use...
But the quick answer is that people programming in Fortran use the usual editors - Visual Studio Code, Emacs, Vim, CLion, etc.