OSSODA and (free) Fortran 95/200x

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot indiv dot nluug dot nl>]

Dear Sir,

Just yesterday one of my fellow members of the ANSI Fortran 
Standardization Committee J3 (www.j3-fortran.org) pointed out to me the 
document found at:

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/pathforward_trilab/OSSODA_PF_RFI_V9e.pdf

In it, I find the following assessment of the Fortran situation at the 
three National Laboratories under consideration (page 23):

"There is a large legacy code base of Fortran 77 code. One popular 
open-source compiler, g77 cannot even begin to compile any of this 
legacy code due to missing support for Cray-style pointers and many 
other legacy extensions. Another popular open-source compiler, Open64, 
cannot compile any of this code because it lacks support for the 
required platforms. This legacy code base needs to be maintained and 
ported to new platforms. There are several code efforts actively 
developing Fortran77/9x software.

We are seeing a remarkable decline in the Fortran user community both 
inside and outside of the general HPC community. Many HPC community 
codes are turning to C/C++, but Fortran is still very important in the 
NNSA Tri-Laboratory HPC community.

A possible reason behind the decline in the Fortran user base is the 
lack of a standard-compliant, open-source compiler. There is no single 
cross-platform standard compliant open-source compiler solution.

The open-source aspect would get a compiler into the hands of 
universities at no cost. This would serve to increase the Fortran 
programmer base, which will, at the very least, provide a base from 
which to draw Fortran programmers. At best, it will make the language 
more popular which would in turn increase the likelihood of better 
quality Fortran compilers and tools."

As the maintainer of g77 I appreciate this analysis (and I agree with it 
fully), but I am surprised that the document suggests that a free 
Fortran 95 compiler doesn't exist at all.

The effort to create g95 dates back to 1999.  In July of this year, the 
code base was integrated into the central GCC CVS repository. We expect 
that the code, which is part of an experimental branch at the moment, 
will be ready for release by the end of 2004.

The obvious question, from our side (the developers of free software), 
is: Why would you want to bootstrap a new effort instead of supporting 
an existing one ?

Sincerely yours,

--
Toon Moene - mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phoneto: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Maintainer, GNU Fortran 77: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77_news.html
GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/ (under construction)