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Re: Original commit history for gfortran
2011/6/19 "C. Bergström" <cbergstrom@pathscale.com>:
> In this case I serve the end user/community and not directly open source.
> ?Why? ?Would it be good for Fortran if a F2K3 front-end was freely available
> under a commercially friendly license? ?(This is a deeper question I'd love
> feedback on)
From my point of view a freely available F2K compiler is the only hope
for something like a "Fortran community" to keep exisiting (or even
for the language itself to survive). Of course this does not mean at
all that there is no space for high-quality commercial compilers. I
even think that the commercial compiler vendors might profit from the
existence of a freely available compiler.
Note that right now we have barely *any* compiler which can claim to
have a complete F2K implementation (though a few are quite close).
Among the freely available ones, gfortran is surely the one which is
closest.
> ? ?a. I see people moving away from Fortran and more towards C++. ?(Sorry no
> empirical data to back this, but how do we stop this trend)
This is surely true. The only way to stop it is to provide a Fortran
implementation of those features that make C++ so attractive (e.g.
object orientation, etc). Such an implementation must be freely
available and on the same quality level as, say, g++.
> ? ?d. Would there be any negative impact to gfortran if PGI/Intel took the
> front-end? ?(Or even worse PathScale *gasp*)
What exactly do you mean by "taking" the front-end?
> Not all commercial companies are bad (Redhat, Canonical.. etc). ?From my
> perspective it's commercial companies that generally pay people to work full
> time and get real engineering in open source done.
Agreed. Another example being Google, which helped me a lot to
contribute to gfortran (via several Summer of Code stipends).
> If you have concerns about PathScale email me privately. ?My intention is to
> vet the codebase. ?Vetting g95 is relatively easy, but there's a chasm
> between it and gfortran I'm trying to map. ?If that's successful I'd like to
> figure out if/how PathScale can contribute. ?if we continue to get much more
> negatively this early on (I don't care the reason). ?I'll just forget the
> whole thing.
If you want this discussion to take a more positive direction, maybe
you should try to explain your intentions a bit more clearly instead
of making cloudy allusions. What exactly are you aiming for?
Cheers,
Janus