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Fortran Web Framework
- iddan 5y agoCould be useful for wrapping old FORTRAN code with an API and test suite that can be later reused if implementation is changed
- echelon 5y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11938405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11938405 (227 points by mapmeld on June 20, 2016 | 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226174 (165 points by da02 on Dec 21, 2016 | 113 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120285 (422 points by lelf on Jan 22, 2020 | 247 comments)
- stabbles 5y agoLet's not forget about a C++ committee member tweeting that Fortran does a better job at package management: https://twitter.com/blelbach/status/1387618008185524225 https://twitter.com/blelbach/status/1387618008185524225
- joelbluminator 5y agoI wanna begin my journey with learnin C (again). Why isn't there a normal package management system? I mean there was a lot of time to solve this issue, is it a technical issue or just lack of innovation in C?
- numlock86 5y agoFor C there isn't really a problem that a package manager would solve. I can think of some problems it would cause, though.
- rk06 5y agoCitation needed. I am confident that it is possible to write reusable C code, and thus there is a need for packaging such reusable code and manage them
- karatinversion 5y agoLike the user you’re replying to, I to find the concept of a C package manager baffling. I don’t know what your background is, but some reasons for my reaction: - a plethora of details that are implementation specific; - different compilers and platforms that differ in important details; - as a consequence of above, most code ends up targeting some limited set is compilers and platforms; - no standard build system to build package management on top of - the header file system, which allows api declaration and implementation to be decoupled By the time you’ve narrowed down enough to make these tractable, you might as well use a given operating system’s package management tools as your “C package manager”.
- maleldil 5y agoC++ has all of these problems, but Conan and vcpkg still exist. They aren't perfect, but they're so much better than nothing. You're also ignoring the fact that Linux isn't the only operating system in the world. Some of us write multi-platform software, and package managers make it so much easier.
- thinkharderdev 5y agoI recently started working in C++ again and my experience with C++ package managers were pretty dismal (I tried vcpkg and Conan). Just trying to setup a PoC project with only two dependencies took me multiple days and neither Conan nor vcpkg worked. And this was on an Intel MBP so not exactly some exotic platform.
- xorcist 5y agoC++ has package management?
- pjmlp 5y agoYes, vcpkg, NuGET and Conan.
- bkallus 5y agoConan among others.
- hoseja 5y agoThere's like 50 different ones with different models of what a package is, capabilities, etc. But at least when it's such a pain you don't end up with JS mess where everything depends on everything and deleting a trivial package breaks half the web.
- throw_m239339 5y ago> But at least when it's such a pain you don't end up with JS mess where everything depends on everything and deleting a trivial package breaks half the web. JS doesn't have real issues, when I say JS I say in the context in which it was created, AKA the browser. Browsers have an huge API where everything and its contrary are possible. The problem is Node.js delegating the most basic things to a for profit company, NPM and it was 100% by design... with Node.js, you can't even parse a multipart request without a 3rd party package... the whole "unix philosophy" for packages was purely marketing bullshit and someone got very rich exploiting Node.js bad choices (Isaac...)
- mrkramer 5y agoAny tutorials on Web Fortran?
- nirse 5y agoSurely this is going to be the Next Big Thing.
- joelbluminator 5y agoIt might; hipsters love old stuff so...
- nix23 5y agoAnd Linux dev's loves to reinvent the wheel, but this time as a square ;)
- bodge5000 5y agoI hope not, its been on my list for ages because barely anyone (compartively to other languages) still works with it, but a lot of legacy systems still rely on it. If hipsters come in and take that from me I'll have to learn something even worse
- code_duck 5y agoI actually founded /r/fortran as a joke because I thought nobody used it anymore, but it was later adopted by people who in fact use modern FORTRAN. Later I met someone who has a very good job programming in FORTRAN for a 20,000 CPU supercomputer which is used to simulate nuclear explosions. It is in fact a current, relevant language that has specific unique strengths.
- amelius 5y agoDoes it compile to WASM?
- shakna 5y agoGetting Fortran running on WASM is a little bit of an exercise in madness [0], but is possible, if involving a lot of moving parts. [0] https://chrz.de/2020/04/21/fortran-in-the-browser/ https://chrz.de/2020/04/21/fortran-in-the-browser/
- zozbot234 5y agoSurely this project should be named Fortran on Forklifts?
- don-code 5y agoI remember seeing this in practice at a meetup - I believe it was at the Boston AWS meetup at Vistaprint several years ago. Someone was running FORTRAN web services as CGI applications, inside of nginx, inside of a container, running on top of Docker Swarm. Say what you will - it seems pretty practical.
- nikkinana 5y agoI'd say the perfect language for H1b's to write shit spaghetti code that will surely match their life outlook.
- Flocular 5y agoAlways interesting to me to see how much "IT-first" educated people think that Fortran is a dead language. While when learning physics first you will quickly see how very much alive it still is (newest standard is "Fortran 2018" btw) Every weather forcast you are seeing was computed using Fortran for example :P
- II2II 5y agoGranted this was about 20 years ago, yet when Fortran was still labelled as dead. Part of my undergraduate Physics degree involved programming in BASIC, the reason for this was that they felt it was both a readily available language and that it would make for a smoother transition to Fortran provided that we followed their stylistic guidelines. Sure enough, I was dealing with Fortran code a couple of years later. (In that case, it was legacy code but it didn't take much poking around to discover that modern versions were used for HPC.)
- _fat_santa 5y agoBack in college I had an internship at an aerospace company. I remember having the exact same thought that "Fortran is dead". I could not have been more wrong, Fortran at least at engineering shops is alive and well.
- satronaut 5y agoi love how fortran and matlab are in their own industrial bubbles
- aitchnyu 5y agoWhat is Matlab's moat? Did free software not catch up?
- blacktriangle 5y agoThe third party domain specific apps built on top of MATLAB is their moat.
- streamofdigits 5y ago"the network is the supercomputer"(TM)
- kevincox 5y agoYou gotta love it when the first example includes an SQL injection: https://fortran.io/static/model.html https://fortran.io/static/model.html
- dangerbird2 5y agoThe "s" in FORTRAN stands for "security"
- 57844743385 5y agoThere are zero job ads for FORTRAN or cobol in my country’s job site. Languages don’t get no deader than that.
- psd1 5y ago𓂀𓅃𓀃?
- jedimastert 5y agoI got curious, but I'm disapointed to say that mustache does not currently have a Fortran implementation. Of course, there's a C implementation and bindings are only ever a few lines away...
- jedimastert 5y agoI actually have a surprising amount of experience in Fortran, as both of my major "research" projects in college had to do with legacy Fortran code bases. The first was fitting a series of potential energy calculation libraries with Mathematica bindings, and the second was converting a library that did a particular kind of blur and glob detection to FITS datasets to C. The second one was extra fun because the library was actually written in "FORCE", an extensive macro-extension of Fortran, for which we no longer had a compiler. All I had was docs, the original published paper, the original source, and a handful of input-output examples on substantial datasets (for context, the datasets were essentially a 1024 x 1024 x 1024 array of floats that needed to be convolved with two different Gaussian kernels and compared pixel by pixel in an interesting way).
- leephillips 5y agoI think of Fortran as one of the most important half-dozen languages in use. But I think of computers as devices for computing things, rather than primarily for serving advertising over the web. But I would’t use a Fortran web framework. It’s not well-suited to that. Fortran is one of only two languages with a concise array syntax that’s used at the most demanding levels of high performance computing. The other is Julia.
- tasty_freeze 5y agoAPL?
- leephillips 5y agoIt's efficient and certainly has concise array syntax. But it's not actually used for high performance simulations. Nobody is running APL on petaflop machines to simulate galaxy mergers.
- mumblemumble 5y agoI could imagine using a Fortran Web framework when the goal is to build a monitoring console or API into a large Fortran project. In situations like that, the effort to make it so that you can build the Web-facing parts in a more Web-friendly language is often far greater than the effort to just build the bits you need in the main language.
- necheffa 5y agoAs someone who works professionally with large Fortran applications - the last thing you want to do is put Fortran anything on the web. Everything, and I do mean everything, is such a pain in the ass with Fortran. To the point where large scale applications are riddled with trivial overflow, race condition, and injection bugs because the language actively fights against doing things the right way.
- pklausler 5y agoFortran's array syntax isn't really all that common in HPC codes, in my experience. The initial implementations in the 90's weren't great, and then things got themselves into a death spiral of HPC codes avoiding features that weren't performance-portable and compiler vendors avoiding work on features that weren't essential to current HPC applications. (This has been a repeated pattern in Fortran since then, too, unfortunately. J3 invents something, often with flaws that go unnoticed until somebody tries to implement it; compilers don't invest in as-yet unused features, especially flawed ones; codes don't use them because they're not portable, or not performance-portable; repeat. DO CONCURRENT is the latest example -- J3 defined it as a serial construct and included semantics that can preclude parallelization...)
- krylon 5y agoI remember a couple of years ago someone created an MVC web framework for COBOL, but I don't think it was intended for serious use. More like the web framework equivalent of esoteric programming languages. This looks, let's say, less obviously whimsical. Is there a serious use case for this, or is this another case of "becase we can"? Honest question.
- fasquoika 5y agohttp://www.coboloncogs.org/ http://www.coboloncogs.org/
- krylon 5y agoThat's the one!
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoI'm still waiting on a MUMPS web framework to make old Perl code look legible.
- emmap21 5y agoI was shocked to see this language popped up as a web framework. Before this, it was something belonged to a computational science lab with a BIG project in 1990s.