[J3] [EXTERNAL] Re: [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

[Damian Rouson]

On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 8:03 AM Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) via J3 <
j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org> wrote:

> Hi Katherine,
>
>
>
> A couple of comment that might be of interest:
>
>
>
>    1. You might want to consider gfortran as end-of-life.  Many of us are
>    putting our eggs into the flang basket.  Still a good retirement activity,
>    but with less historical clutter.
>
>
gfortran development is still quite active actually (over 100 emails on the
gfortran mailing list in December -- most focused on patches adding 2018
features or OpenMP support).  The gfortran developers recently set up a
Mattermost (open-source Slack clone) server that has 25 members. I suspect
fewer than half are active developers, but I'm also aware of a few active
developers who aren't there.  As another measure, the gfortran mailing list
had over 100 emails in December from roughly 15 unique people and most of
the emails related to proposed patches.

I recently expressed some pessimism about gfortran to Tom privately, but
that was driven largely by one project on which I need derived type
coarrays with allocatable components, a feature that is too big for me to
fund myself (a solution that has worked well for me over the past ~15
years) and not one that I think any of the gfortran developers with the
required expertise is likely to implement on their own.  If I hadn't hit
that one roadblock, I'd continue with gfortran. And it's still usable on my
other projects.

Like others, I'm having to put my eggs in the LLVM flang bucket both
because I have related funding and because it probably has a brighter
long-term future thanks to corporate code contributions, which were
jump-started by millions of dollars of investment from DOE.

Damian


>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.j3-fortran.org/pipermail/j3/attachments/20240108/40a9b1a9/attachment.htm>