gfortran IRC meeting on Sunday, 20 November

[Tobias Burnus]

Hi all,

as suggested at  [1], I would like to have a post-Stage-1 meeting in IRC 
(irc.oftc.net's #gfortran) next Sunday at the usual time: 21:00 (9pm) 
CET, 20:00 (8pm) UTC, 12:00 (noon) PST.

Suggested topics:
- Stage 3 work
- 4.8 work
- miscellaneous

For Stage 3: Besides the committal of Paul's almost ready polymorphic 
array patch, I would like to see some more OOP fixes (including 
polymorphic coarrays, fixes for issues related to polymorphic arrays and 
possibly also some of the poly. operator bugs). I also would like to see 
fixes to the deferred-length support for character variables; this 4.6 
feature has still some loose ends, which hamper the use. For coarrays, 
fixing intrinsic assignments (no reallocation of coarray components) and 
deallocation support with -fcoarray=lib are on my wishlist. And, of 
course, we should reduce the number of regressions* - and fix many of 
the small bugs. (* see [1] for an almost up-to-date list.)

For 4.8 we have a huge number of projects which we could work on. For 
instance: IEEE, true multi-image coarrays, unlimited polymorphism, 
finalization subroutines. But also: Parameterized derived types / 
deferred-length character components, user-defined I/O, submodules, and 
plenty of minor items. Other items like cpp (target macros, 
nontraditional mode), better diagnostics, additional !GCC$ attributes 
support, etc. [There was also once the plan to include a POSIX 
library/module to create directories etc. and to include the ISO Varying 
strings, though the latter is probably obsolete by now.]
And we have the array-descriptor update which is related to the TS 29113 
descriptor, is an issue by itself (correctness, maximal rank), and plays 
possibly a role for unlimited polymorphism* and for TS29113 items like 
type(*) and dimension(..). (* The TS 29113's descriptor contains a 
field/component to denote the data type.) Additionally, the chance of 
breaking the ABI should be used to do some cleanup.

Miscellaneous: Whatever comes up - such as funding/attracting 
developers, nice-to-know items [3], WG5 news [2].

[1] "Fwd: GCC 4.7.0 Status Report (2011-11-08), Stage 1 is over, Stage 3 
in effect immediately", http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/2011-11/msg00093.html

[2] WG5/J3:
- There is now a draft corrigendum for F2008, cf. 
ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1851-N1900/N1893.pdf
- TS 29113 is almost ready for the second round of ISO ballots; latest 
is: ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1851-N1900/N1888.txt
- The next J3/WG5 work item (besides interpretation requests) is the TS 
for coarrays; cf. ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1851-N1900/N1888.txt ; 
only afterwards, the committee will work on the successor of F2008.

[3] There was an announcement by PGI/Nvidia/Cray/CAPS for OpenACC [for 
C/C++/Fortran], which is similar to OpenMP but for accelerators (GPGPU). 
GCC might consider to also work on supporting it at some point. Those 
companies are also in the OpenMP WG on accelerators. See 
http://www.openacc-standard.org/ for details.

Tobias