Offer to become a GFortran developer

[Janus Weil]

Hi Federico,

> I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin.
> I mainly work on combustion numerics and chemical kinetics and among my
> research interests there is the aim to develop robust and extremely
> efficient codes for multidimensional combustion simulations.

sounds like a very typical occupation for a gfortran developer :)

I think many of use have an academic background in sciences close to
physics and chemistry. I'm myself a postdoc working on simulation
codes for heavy-ion collisions.


> I've been using modern Fortran extensively since my PhD, and I would like to
> contribute to the GFortran project

Sounds great!


> as I believe that completing the compiler with further options from the
> Fortran2003/2008/Co-array Fortran standards
> would make Fortran a high quality language for robust and fast scientific
> programming.

Total agreement here. For a while many Fortran people were switching
to languages like C++, but recently I have the feeling that Fortran is
gaining popularity again (probably connected to the increasing
availability of modern Fortran compilers).


> As a beginner contributor, I would like to start from tasks such as
> implementation of intrinsics / efficiency improvements,

Tobias has already given most of the relevant pointers here. I think
it makes sense to simply scratch your own itch: Fix the bugs which are
annoying you most and implement the features you find most useful.


> but I would also
> then like to deal with more complex things (e.g., it would be fantastic to
> complete a co-array implementation, maybe MPI-based, that works).

Yes, in the long run a full implementation of coarrays is a very
important goal for gfortran. As mentioned by Tobias, there is a basic
level of support for coarray syntax already, but the actual
communication etc is still missing.


> Looking forward to receiving your opinion about this,

Only one thing left to say: Welcome aboard  :)

Cheers,
Janus