The State of Fortran

Laurence Kedward (1); Balint Aradi (2); Ondrej Certik (3) and; Milan Curcic (4); Sebastian Ehlert (5); Philipp Engel (6); Rohit; Goswami (7; 8); Michael Hirsch (9); Asdrubal Lozada-Blanco (10) and; Vincent Magnin (11); Arjen Markus (12); Emanuele Pagone (13); Ivan; Pribec (14); Brad Richardson (15); Harris Snyder (16); John Urban; (17); Jeremie Vandenplas (18) ((1) Department of Aerospace Engineering,; University of Bristol; (2) Bremen Center for Computational Materials Science,; (3) Los Alamos National Laboratory; (4) University of Miami; (5) Mulliken; Center for Theoretical Chemistry; Institut fur Physikalische und Theoretische; Chemie Universitat Bonn; (6) Institut fur Geodasie und; Geoinformationstechnik; Technische Universitat Berlin; (7) Quansight Austin; USA; (8) Science Institute; University of Iceland; (9) Center for Space; Physics; Boston University; (10) Sao Carlos Institute of Physics; University; of Sao Paulo; (11) Univ. Lille; CNRS; Centrale Lille; Univ. Polytechnique; Hauts-de-France; IEMN; (12) Deltares Research Institute; The Netherlands,; (13) Cranfield University; Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre; School; of Aerospace Transport; Manufacturing; (14) Chair of Brewing; Beverage; Technology; Technical University of Munich; (15) Archaeologic; Inc.; (16); Structura Biotechnology Inc.; Toronto; Canada; (17) HPC Consultant; USA; (18); Animal Breeding; Genomics; Wageningen; The Netherlands)

arXiv:2203.15110·cs.PL·December 19, 2023

The State of Fortran

Laurence Kedward (1), Balint Aradi (2), Ondrej Certik (3) and, Milan Curcic (4), Sebastian Ehlert (5), Philipp Engel (6), Rohit, Goswami (7, 8), Michael Hirsch (9), Asdrubal Lozada-Blanco (10) and, Vincent Magnin (11), Arjen Markus (12), Emanuele Pagone (13), Ivan, Pribec (14)

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TL;DR

This paper discusses ongoing efforts to modernize Fortran, highlighting its continued relevance for scientific computing through community development, standard library, package manager, and language improvements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent initiatives to modernize Fortran and shares lessons applicable to other programming languages.

Findings

01

Development of a Fortran standard library and package manager

02

Enhanced compiler support and language features

03

A welcoming online community for developers

Abstract

A community of developers has formed to modernize the Fortran ecosystem. In this article, we describe the high-level features of Fortran that continue to make it a good choice for scientists and engineers in the 21st century. Ongoing efforts include the development of a Fortran standard library and package manager, the fostering of a friendly and welcoming online community, improved compiler support, and language feature development. The lessons learned are common across contemporary programming languages and help reduce the learning curve and increase adoption of Fortran.

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