Steve Lionel, Convenor of the ISO/IEC Fortran Standard Committee, talks about how a Fortran standard is made and then gives an overview of what's new in Fortran 2018. Looking to the future, Steve then highlights features planned for the next revision of the standard, whose working title is Fortran 202X.
A thriving community around a programming language is essential for onboarding
new users and retaining existing ones. Besides a few discussion boards and mailing lists, Fortran has not had a healthy online community in the modern internet era, like many other programming languages have. Despite the developments of the language, its user base has been declining as a result. Many new software...
The Fortran Standard, as published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), does not include a Standard Library. The language can be extended with new intrinsic procedures and modules, but these must be formally standardized and then implemented by compiler vendors before becoming available to users. Therefore, the goal of this project is to provide a community driven and...
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...
The gfortran front end to gcc reads in the source code and converts it to an abstract syntax tree, which is then converted to an intermediate representation which gcc then further optimizes and converts into assembler. However, there are certain optimizations that require knowledge of Fortran semantics and which are better handled at the level of the abstract syntax tree because the rest of...
We'll present the goals, current status and future plans for Flang, the LLVM Fortran front-end.
Flang is the new LLVM-based Fortran front-end supporting full Fortran 2018. It is being written from scratch in modern C++ and will make extensive use of existing LLVM tools (MLIR, LLVM IR, utility libraries, and so on). We expect this to be the last Fortran front-end that will ever need to be...
We are developing a modern open-source Fortran compiler called LFortran
(https://lfortran.org/). This front-end compiler will enable the interactive
execution of code in environments like Jupyter. This will allow exploratory work
(much like Python, MATLAB or Julia) which is currently not feasible. The
interactivity of our compiler does not impede compilation of binaries with the
goal to...
Copernicus is a spacecraft trajectory design and optimization application developed at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Copernicus is written in Fortran and uses many features of the latest language standards. The tool is used for a wide range of projects at NASA, including the upcoming Artemis missions to flight test the Orion spacecraft and then return humans to the Moon. This presentation...
For decades Fortran has been on the forefront of high performance computing. As new architectures emerged, the Fortran standard added constructs to exploit them, but not always with complete success. For example, F90 added array syntax to describe vectorization, yet vectorizing compilers found it easier to translate DO loops with appropriate directives. Co-arrays were added in F08 and...
Allowing users to control software using input control files has substantial benefits for ease of use, avoidance of error and reproducibility of results. Evaluation of mathematical expressions provides a powerful way of allowing user control of even the most complex codes while remaining natural and easy-to-learn for the end user. Derived from the input control system of the EPOCH...
We will discuss the integration of R with Fortran, using such tools as
MPI, OpenACC and CUDA Fortran on a Windows laptop. We will consider how
to create a package with all three of these tools. We will demonstrate the
considerable speedup with ordinary kriging and other spatial functions. We
can exploit the statistical functions by utilizing the NVIDIA graphics card
in conjunction with...
At first glance, Fortran may not be easily associated with the emerging Internet of Things and its new networked services, data formats, and protocols. In fact, the language features of modern Fortran make it possible to inter-connect with existing third-party libraries, written in C, Lua, Python, and other languages. With the toolset given by the ISO C binding module, Fortran applications...
The gtk-fortran binding (https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/wiki), developed since 2011, is based on the ISO_C_BINDING module, introduced in the Fortran 2003 standard, which is used to interface fortran programs with the functions of the GTK libraries (mainly written in C). gtk-fortran is multi-platform: Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, Windows (via MSYS2), and even Raspberry Pi (ARM...
Fortran application often need to access libraries which are written
in C or C++. The interoperability with C features introduced in
Fortran 2003 standardized access to symbols and types. But to access
all of the features of C++ libraries additional wrapper code must be
written, often by the author of the C++ library who may not be
familiar with modern Fortran features.
Shroud is a tool...
In the world of quantum chemistry programs, Fortran reigns supreme. While there are packages available that are purely written in C++ and Python, it has become increasingly common to combine different languages. Common combinations include C++/Fortran or Python/C++.
Fortran 2003 introduced a standardized way to generate interoperable procedures and derived types with the C programming...
Controlling program flow from scripting languages is a tractable extension which lowers barriers for extending functionality in lower level languages (such as fortran).
In this presentation we show how a set of required features enables end-users to change and control the program flow using Lua scripts.
The following features are necessary for minimal code in the hosting program:
-...
While writing a FORTRAN code, the developer is often obliged to increase code smell (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell) due to the intrinsic characteristic of the programming language.
This problem not only generate inaesthetically long code, but is also responsible of the great majority of side-effects and bugs.
The FUTILE project is an attempt to simplify developer's life by...
Different strategies towards generic programming in Fortran are discussed. The Fypp preprocessor is presented as a versatile tool for condititional compilation and template metaprogramming.
While Fortran is usually used for serious work, number crunching for instance, it does not mean that that is the only way to use it. Far from it, the features offered by modern Fortran allow all manner of experimentation with other programming paradigms. Emulating, say, prototype-based object-oriented programming may not lead to an efficient implementation, but it offers the benefits of...
OpenCL is a well-established and widely-supported standard for executing parallel workloads
on accelerator devices such as conventional multicore CPUs as well as GPUs and FPGAs.
In this presentation, detail is given on a modern Fortran library which wraps calls to the OpenCL API with a higher abstraction level aimed at scientists and engineers looking to execute highly-parallel OpenCL...
In the community of environmental modelling, the advent of hyper-resolution Earth observations and datasets in conjuncture with growing computational resources lead to an increase in model resolution.
The mathematical representations of biogeophysical processes need to be solved for billions of grid cells and thousands of time points.
Each process requires parameters that cannot be easily...
Implementing artificial neural networks is commonly achieved via high-level programming languages like Python, and easy-to-use deep learning libraries like Keras. These software libraries come pre-loaded with a variety of network architectures, provide autodifferentiation, and support GPUs for fast and efficient computation. As a result, a deep learning practitioner will favor training a...
While it is possible to write Fortran code with a simple text editor, many programmers prefer to use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for their work. In addition to simply highlighting text in many editors, Code::Blocks offers Fortran users a grouping of their code files into projects, compiling code with the selected compiler directly from the IDE, code navigation, code completion...
F2PY is a tool (authored by Pearu Peterson in 1999) to generate custom CPython
extension modules to interface high-performance Fortran or C libraries to high-level Python code. The F2PY tool, currently packaged with NumPy, is one of the most fundamental packages in the scientific Python ecosystem. On the other hand, F2PY has not kept up with modern Fortran standards, as evidenced by the lack...
Fortran has long been the language of computational math and science and it has outlived many of the computer architectures on which it has been used. Modern Fortran must be able to run on modern, highly parallel, heterogeneous computer architectures. A significant number of Fortran programmers have had success programming for heterogeneous machines by pairing Fortran with the OpenACC language...
Anatem is a software developed by the Brazilian Electrical Energy Research Center (Cepel) that aims to evaluate electromechanical disturbances on large power systems, being the most used software in Brazil for that matter. Its development dates from the late '80s through today, being a legacy code mostly written in Fortran 77 standard and before object-oriented programming mindset even...
We present the ParaMonte library, a pure-modern-Fortran open-source software for serial and parallel stochastic sampling and integration of high-dimensional mathematical objective functions of arbitrary shapes and dimensions. The principal design goals of the ParaMonte library are: 1. full automation of the entire build process of the library as well as all Monte Carlo simulations, 2....
