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It is not animosity -- I love the simplicity of FORTRAN -- but I am stating my speculation. C replaces FORTRAN. That is from merit point of view. In reality, c

It is not animosity -- I love the simplicity of FORTRAN -- but I am stating my speculation. C replaces FORTRAN. That is from merit point of view. In reality, computational physicists mostly goes to C++ plus Python. Truth to be told, physicists are not computer scientists and they are not even into it. They simply picked out of necessity/convenience -- which was the reason FORTRAN was picked then. PS: That FORTRAN is fast is over stated IMHO. I am familiar with high performance computing. In terms of parallel computing, it all boils down to algorithm design. In terms of vector/linear algebra, it all depends on machine tuned BLAS (which is mostly due to hand crafting rather than the language itself). There is no evidence FORTRAN code runs necessarily faster than C -- comparing first craft non-optimized code. Unlike C, FORTRAN is less capable and more cumbersome to do trendy stuff -- this is the actual merit of FORTRAN over C.

Annatar 10y ago
PS: That FORTRAN is fast is over stated IMHO. From my point of view, it's understated, and should be given much more credit than it gets. intel has done a lot of work to make their ifort compiler leverage their latest instruction sets like AVX2, resulting in even bigger speedups, and PGI has done absolutely amazing work of writing a compiler which can ingest unmodified Fortran code and compile it to run on NVidia GPU's. It's nothing short of mind blowing to me and gets way too little mention. Modern Fortran is a really nice language and all this bashing of it because it's not trendy is completely unfounded. Just ask intel.
- dagw 10y ago
  I believe that one of Fortran's biggest problem is that if you want to get all the advantages that modern Fortran has to offer you have to use closed source commercial tools. If the open source tools had been closer to what PGI and Intel offers in terms of features and performance I don't doubt that Fortran would be more popular.
- hzhou321 10y ago
  Seems I have not been kept up :)

Annatar 10y ago

PS: That FORTRAN is fast is over stated IMHO. From my point of view, it's understated, and should be given much more credit than it gets. intel has done a lot of work to make their ifort compiler leverage their latest instruction sets like AVX2, resulting in even bigger speedups, and PGI has done absolutely amazing work of writing a compiler which can ingest unmodified Fortran code and compile it to run on NVidia GPU's. It's nothing short of mind blowing to me and gets way too little mention. Modern Fortran is a really nice language and all this bashing of it because it's not trendy is completely unfounded. Just ask intel.

dagw 10y ago
I believe that one of Fortran's biggest problem is that if you want to get all the advantages that modern Fortran has to offer you have to use closed source commercial tools. If the open source tools had been closer to what PGI and Intel offers in terms of features and performance I don't doubt that Fortran would be more popular.
hzhou321 10y ago
Seems I have not been kept up :)