3 GFORTRAN and G77

Why do we write a compiler front end from scratch? There's a fine Fortran 77 compiler in the GNU Compiler Collection that accepts some features of the Fortran 90 standard as extensions. Why not start from there and revamp it?

One of the reasons is that Craig Burley, the author of G77, has decided to stop working on the G77 front end. On Craig explains the reasons for his decision to stop working on G77 in one of the pages in his homepage. Among the reasons is a lack of interest in improvements to g77. Users appear to be quite satisfied with g77 as it is. While g77 is still being maintained (by Toon Moene), it is unlikely that sufficient people will be willing to completely rewrite the existing code.

But there are other reasons to start from scratch. Many people, including Craig Burley, no longer agreed with certain design decisions in the G77 front end. Also, the interface of g77 to the back end is written in a style which is confusing and not up to date on recommended practice. In fact, a full rewrite had already been planned for GCC 3.0.

When Craig decided to stop, it just seemed to be a better idea to start a new project from scratch, because it was expected to be easier to maintain code we develop ourselves than to do a major overhaul of g77 first, and then build a Fortran 95 compiler out of it.