The status of the GNU Fortran project [LWN.net]

The status of the GNU Fortran project

Posted Dec 1, 2005 17:20 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151)
Parent article: The status of the GNU Fortran project

Thanks for the update - I'm sure a lot of readers here are interested / following the development.

I second a statement of a previous poster. The article fails to address that g95 and gfortran are different projects now, and what is said for one does not hold for the other. E.g., g95 is bug-free (as far as known) - gfortran is not (as far as known). gfortran is official gcc - g95 is not.

I am aware of the deep-rooted split between some of the developers and the reasons, and really appreciate that this unnecessary episode of free software history is not detailed here; however, the fact that there are two products does deserve an explicit mention.

PS: g95 "just works" for me. Lacking a full gcc 4 installation, I have not yet tried successfully to even get gfortran to run, but it appears to have a number of leftover bugs, just from reading the mailing lists. Any experiences with gfortran vs g95, anyone?

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The status of the GNU Fortran project

Posted Dec 5, 2005 23:10 UTC (Mon) by kneth (subscriber, #5341) [Link]

I'm sorry not for being absolutely clear between G95 and gfortran. I would also like to have addressed the GOMP project a bit further.

The status of the GNU Fortran project

Posted Dec 6, 2005 3:56 UTC (Tue) by bamrung (guest, #19446) [Link]

Yes! g95 "just work" for me too. I migrated from Portland's Fortran 90 when I got my first Athlon 64 for my scientific research project. I found that g95 is more serious about the standard of Fortran than the Portland's. My code is not running on gfortran yet, the code compiled but the file I/O part just not work as expected yet.

The status of the GNU Fortran project

Posted Dec 8, 2005 16:53 UTC (Thu) by steven97 (guest, #2702) [Link]

The gfortran released with GCC 4.0.0 is not nearly as good as some recent G95 snapshots. Later GCC 4.0.x releases have a better gfortran. I think the gfortran in GCC 4.1 will be the first real test to see how well it works for everyone.

G95 is more careful about being standard conforming, but GFortran produces far better code for e.g. the Polyhedron benchmarks and SPECCPU. For me, G95 still doesn't build my codes while GFortran does. For others it may be the other way around.

The nice thing about g95 is that its release process is more dynamic than gfortran's. A new G95 binary is uploaded almost daily, while a gfortran binary is a bit harder to find (they do exist, see http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries).