(j3.2006) Fortran is more popular than ever
Rasmussen, Craig E
rasmussn
Fri Oct 7 17:23:45 EDT 2011
"Just this past week, a senior radio telescope astronomer told me about the shift from C++ back to Fortran in his corner of the world."
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2011/09/24/fortran-is-more-popular-than-ever-intel-makes-it-fast/
What? Impossible, sacrilege!
Actually I heard the same thing from a JPL scientist last year. I periodically ask compiler vendors on the J3 Fortran standards committee how they are doing financially and they say fine, business is increasing. After designing and programming most of the neural science, PetaVision framework in C++, I regret not having implemented PetaVision in both C++ and Fortran; C++ for component assembly and control and Fortran for computation. It would have saved us months of effort fixing design bugs related to pointer chasing and probably would have helped performance too as it would have saved us first loading a pointer to memory, then actually loading the memory. For most of the code we could have just calculated memory offsets.
-craig
More information about the J3
mailing list