Toward Modern Fortran Tooling and a Thriving Developer Community

TL;DR

This paper discusses efforts to modernize Fortran tooling and foster a vibrant developer community by developing core tools, libraries, and resources to improve the language's ecosystem and attract new users.

Contribution

The paper introduces a community-driven initiative to develop modern tooling, libraries, and resources for Fortran, addressing its outdated ecosystem and enhancing developer experience.

Findings

Development of a standard library for Fortran

Creation of a build system and package manager

Establishment of a community-curated website

Abstract

Fortran is the oldest high-level programming language that remains in use today and is one of the dominant languages used for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications. However, Fortran has not kept up with the modern software development practices and tooling in the internet era. As a consequence, the Fortran developer experience has diminished. Specifically, lack of a rich general-purpose library ecosystem, modern tools for building and packaging Fortran libraries and applications, and online learning resources, has made it difficult for Fortran to attract and retain new users. To address this problem, an open source community has formed on GitHub in 2019 and began to work on the initial set of core tools: a standard library, a build system and package manager, and a community-curated website for Fortran. In this paper we report on the progress to date and outline the next steps.