[J3] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

[Damian Rouson]

On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 12:33 PM Long, Bill F <william.long at hpe.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Damian,
>
> Those F2018 features are now available as F2023 features.  Since the publication of F2023, F2018 was deleted.


The gfortran developers have status pages grouped according to when a
feature first entered the language.  These pages show

- 2003 support completed: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Fortran2003Status
- 2008 support very nearly completed: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Fortran2008Status
- 2018 support still far from complete but with all of C-interop and a
lot of parallel features there:
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Fortran2018Status

The thing I've never quite understood is how to get the Fortran
community to support gfortran more.  Most of the developers are
volunteers but some accept contracts for work on features or bug
fixes.  I started funding gfortran work when I was at Sandia and then
funded a lot more via Sourcery Institute and Archaeologic with some
help from sponsors, clients, and donors.  (Thanks, Tom!)  In every
case, I found that a little goes a very long way: we couldn't afford
much and the developers could likely have charged a lot more for the
work if bigger organizations stepped up to contribute.  We paid for
big chunks of the work on type finalization, parameterized derived
types, teams, submodules, coarrays, events, collective subroutines,
user-defined derived type I/O, atomic subroutines, and I think
possibly failed images but that work didn't make it into a release.
In many cases, the feature support is partial because we couldn't
afford to pay for more than what we need, but if I made a very rough
guess from memory, I'm reasonably confident that all of the named
features cost less than $100K over the span of roughly a decade so
that's what less than $10K per year buys.  If a 100 users contributed
$100/year, it would have been more than enough to cover every feature
mentioned at least to a point of being useful even if not complete.
There's a bit more about this in the Sourcery Institute 5-year report
from 2020 that I can forward to anyone interested.

>
> We need Tobias back working on gfortran....

Tobias has been contributing to gfortran regularly for several years
now as part of his current job.  He mostly works on OpenMP and OpenACC
support.  I really wish we could get him back onto working on the
parallel features.

Damian