Re: Original commit history for gfortran

[Christopher Bergström <cbergstrom at pathscale dot com>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 12:02 AM, Janus Weil <janus@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> 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?

Above I was referring to a fortran front-end (like gfortran) being
available under a more permissive license (BSD/MIT. etc)  If that was
true then it would be possible for a commercial compiler (PGI/Intel)
to take the front-end and then just make it emit the IR needed.

>
>
>> 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).

Certainly not an exhaustive list :)

>
>
>> 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?

Nothing cloudy

1) Vet the codebase (stated this clearly)
2) Listen to what people say - (What needs to be worked on, are people
open to things like dual licensing, what's the future of Fortran,
etc..)

For whatever reason someone at Apple has decided to work on "flang".
I'm not sure if the code is public or even a serious effort at all.
Apple certainly has the resources to toss at it, but outside of
someone's personal hobby project I can only think of one reason to
spend time on it.

1) Our goal (PathScale) is to implement F2K3/8
2) My personal goal is to advocate and push open source

# Possibly more important than either of the two points above
3) I'd like to see a larger Fortran community grow out of gfortran.
(This of course largely depends on if the contributors are more
interested in keeping it locked up to gcc or increasing Fortran
adoption.)

btw - I appreciate the feedback and information from everyone so far..

Thanks