GFortran docs: a draft of "Project Status" updates.

[Jerry DeLisle]

Brooks Moses wrote:
> As promised some months ago, I've been working on a thorough rewrite of 
> the "Project Status" section (chapter 5) of the GNU Fortran manual.  I'm 
> waiting on Steve to commit my current patches to gfortran.texi before I 
> submit this one (the problem with making lots of changes to a single 
> file is that all the patches overlap, unless I submit a monster patch 
> that does a dozen different things and hides all the controversial stuff 
> in a sea of typo fixes!), but in the interim, here's a rough draft of 
> the reworded text.
> 
> I'd very much appreciate comments on this.  In particular, does it 
> convey accurate information?  Does it leave anything important out?  Are 
> there things that could be said better?
> 
> This replaces the existing sections 5.1 and 5.2 (Compiler Status and 
> Library Status), along with the paragraph immediately prior to section 
> 5.1 about how "The GNU Fortran compiler is currently reaching the stage 
> where is is able to compile real world programs":
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> 5.1 Compiler and Library Status
> 
> The GNU Fortran compiler is able to compile nearly all 
> standard-compliant Fortran 95, Fortran 90, and Fortran 77 programs, 
> including a number of standard and non-standard extensions, and can be 
> used on real-world programs. In particular, the supported extensions
> include OpenMP, Cray-style pointers, and several Fortran 2003 features 
> such as enumeration, stream I/O, and some of the enhancements to 
> allocatable array support from TR 15581. However, it is still under 
> development and has a few remaining rough edges.
> 
> At present, the GNU Fortran compiler passes the NIST Fortran 77 Test 
> Suite, and nearly passes the LAPACK Test Suite. It also provides 
> respectable performance on the Polyhedron Fortran compiler benchmarks 
> and the Livermore Fortran Kernels test. It has been used to compile a 
> number of large real-world programs, including the HIRLAM 
> weather-forecasting code and the Tonto quantum chemistry package.
> 
> Among other things, the GNU Fortran compiler is intended as a 
> replacement for G77. At this point, nearly all programs that could be 
> compiled with G77 can be compiled with GNU Fortran, although there are a 
> few minor known regressions.
> 
> The primary work remaining to be done on GNU Fortran falls into three 
> categories: bug fixing (primarily regarding the treatment of invalid 
> code and providing useful error messages), improving the compiler 
> optimizations and the performance of compiled code, and extending the 
> compiler to support future standards – in particular, Fortran 2003.
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> Thanks!
> - Brooks
> 
> 
"nearly passes LAPACK"  is not quite right.  The failures there are either 
statistically insignificant, meaning there are some outliers to be expected from 
  the random matrix generation, or they are known bugs in LAPACK itself.

I think it would be correct to say "passes LAPACK within expected margins" or 
equivalent.

Otherwise looks OK.

Jerry