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

Tue Jan 9 14:32:55 UTC 2024

I can only speak on the gov’t side.   If there was a simple way that I could “pay” $100 for a gfortran “license” that would be great and (relatively) simple.  (Don’t ask about the amount of paperwork it requires just to make a $100 purchase on a gov’t credit card under “simplified acquisition”.)   But what is being described here is a _service_.   And setting up a contract for service is an entirely different game and not even worth the effort until it is >> $1k.

In principle, I could go to my management and tell them that we need to spend say $10k-$20k to get some crucial feature or bugfix from a gfortran developer.   They probably would approve.   OK.  So now we need to find a vendor that can provide this service.    I cannot just send the money to a known gfortran developer.  They have to have a legal entity registered to do acquisitions with the US Gov’t.       But since we know DOE is funding some such work, there must be one-or-more such entities, and this could be done.  And then it takes time and patience to dot all the eye’s.   Would I still care about the feature/bug in question that many months later?   Or would I have been forced to find acceptable workarounds by then?

Sigh.  (You may notice that I’m a bit burned-out by NASA procurement processes.)

Cheers,

  *   Tom

From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org> on behalf of j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
Reply-To: j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
Date: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 at 9:08 AM
To: j3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>, "'Long, Bill F'" <william.long at hpe.com>
Cc: "ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk" <ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [J3] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

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I find it strange that people don't budget for software
As part of their research.

When Jane Sleightholme and I worked in the university sector we
Had site licences with both Salford Software and Nag.

We would then 'cost recover' by selling a licence
For the Salford compile, Nag compiler and Nag library
For typically £25 per annum.

With the devolvement of budgets to departments
The site licencing disappeared, and research groups were
Looking at massive costs increases.

Why researchers can't budget for $100 a year for a contribution
For the development of the gfortran compiler beats me.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Ian Chivers

-----Original Message-----
From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org>> On Behalf Of Damian Rouson via J3
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 2:43 AM
To: Long, Bill F <william.long at hpe.com<mailto:william.long at hpe.com>>
Cc: Damian Rouson <rouson at lbl.gov<mailto:rouson at lbl.gov>>; General J3 interest list <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>>
Subject: Re: [J3] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 12:33 PM Long, Bill F <william.long at hpe.com<mailto: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://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgcc.gnu.org%2Fwiki%2FFortran2003Status&data=05%7C02%7Cthomas.l.clune%40nasa.gov%7C41d80c15e9e8469cffae08dc111c78cd%7C7005d45845be48ae8140d43da96dd17b%7C0%7C0%7C638404061191493716%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2F4mh%2BcxLovWnIJNUITwlasFq5awllaabX6DpGHzd4MM%3D&reserved=0<https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Fortran2003Status>
- 2008 support very nearly completed: https://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgcc.gnu.org%2Fwiki%2FFortran2008Status&data=05%7C02%7Cthomas.l.clune%40nasa.gov%7C41d80c15e9e8469cffae08dc111c78cd%7C7005d45845be48ae8140d43da96dd17b%7C0%7C0%7C638404061191493716%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=eUKM5ZYKRGTKfwQxURK7u3bg%2FJkkWuAs6ZqXyHgG700%3D&reserved=0<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://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgcc.gnu.org%2Fwiki%2FFortran2018Status&data=05%7C02%7Cthomas.l.clune%40nasa.gov%7C41d80c15e9e8469cffae08dc111c78cd%7C7005d45845be48ae8140d43da96dd17b%7C0%7C0%7C638404061191493716%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=TZaOBpUQqUDjqw0C%2FbDJbCtQKdanivzqGyLhjnCkXcE%3D&reserved=0<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

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