4 ms·
> I think you completely fail to realize that Fortran does have wide adoption, and that there is a big market for commercial and open-source Fortran compilers,
by qb45 9y ago
> I think you completely fail to realize that Fortran does have wide adoption, and that there is a big market for commercial and open-source Fortran compilers, and that these optimizations have already been made.
100 times this. Few years ago I personally edited Makefiles in one HPC project to test GCC and clang as possible replacements for PGI. Lemme tell you this: they were joke. Like, 2x slower.
First of all, commercial Fortran compilers can do all the simple optimizations like inlining, loop unrolling etc. And then on top of that, they come with loads of HPC-specific optimizations like autovectorization, loop tiling, loop fusion and hell knows what else. GCC recently seems to be developing in this direction, maybe they'll become competitive at some point or maybe already are, clang was behind GCC last time checked.
In any case, state of the art Fortran compilers are good. And guess what, GCC has a Fortran frontend too. No need to speculate, you can go and test GCC on your codebase now.
In fact, most modern high performance compilers, open source or commercial, have multiple frontends for multiple languages, usually including C and Fortran.