Speaker
Description
While Fortran is the oldest high level language, it has done quite well in keeping up with the times in terms of features and capabilities of the language itself. However, modern practices and developers have become accustomed to tools and ecosystems which provide many conveniences in a programming environment. Unfortunately, Fortran has not kept pace with such tooling and ecosystems. One such tool which has become popular is a package manager. A package manger is a tool that manages the dependencies of a project on other libraries. This is accomplished by keeping track of the dependencies, with specifiable version constraints, and automating the process of fetching them - including transitive dependencies - for use in the compilation of the project. Often included are the facilities for compiling, running, and testing the project, as well as searching for available open source libraries, and generating a template for new projects. This paper describes the development of just such a tool for Fortran, aptly named the Fortran Package Manager (FPM).
