Mixed source (C+Fortran) compilation

[ghime]

Dear Fortran users and developers,

I've been brainstorming with some colleagues (in HPC for climate sciences)
the idea of having a C compiler front-ends to accept inline Fortran blocks,
much the same way they (most? all?) accept inline Assembly. There are
several reasons why this would be interesting, all of them boiling down to
narrowing/erasing the gap between C and Fortran, both technical and
cultural. We are pitching this idea to members of the HPC community. The
plan would be to have a proof-of-concept patch of gcc/gfortran.

Some of the long-term consequences, if this ever becomes reality, would be:

- Mixed-source files would enable/force scientists to learn "that other
language".
- Integration would make it easier to achieve/enforce code uniformity and
reduce duplications.
- Performance would be increased by having each language do what it does
best without resorting to function calls.

I'd like to hear peoples thoughts, preferably constructive ones. This is not
something of which benefits would be reaped soon, yet not-soon can come
quite quickly in software development, if there is a will and a way. I
believe the way is quite well-paved in the current state of the gcc compiler
suite.

Cheers,

Gustavo



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