Re: [photran] running photran

[Joe Koski <jkoski11@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug,

I have been following the two open source Fortran 95 efforts from a distance
for over a year. In a nutshell, g95 has compiled and executed all of the
dozen or so Fortran 77 and 95 codes that I've thrown at it, while gfortran
has compiled and executed only a few successfully. What's worse, when I have
a problem, the reporting procedures for gfortran are so difficult that the
average Fortran user couldn't successfully prepare a bug report. When you do
submit a bug, the gfortran folks usually say that it has already been
reported, or at least they think so. The gfortran folks have a "take a
number and wait" approach that discourages users. For g95, the corrections
are often done by the next day after a personal exchange of e-mails. On my
Mac, I have gone through several g95 versions with a simple drag and drop
installation that uses a single symlink in /usr/local/bin. Installation of
gfortran is into /usr/local itself, and new versions are difficult to find
unless you want to build from CVS. The latest g95 binary version is
available for download one day after the update occurs.

Apparently the g95 effort is strongly centered about one person, while the
gfortran effort is spread over several individuals. From a distance, it
seems to be the efficiency of a bureaucracy vs. a single individual. I think
it will be another year or so before we know which is the better final
product.

I too hope that I haven't ruffled too many feathers.

Joe  

 
on 10/31/05 7:58 AM, Doug Schaefer at DSchaefer@xxxxxxx wrote:

> So can someone enlighten me on the g95 versus gfortran story. I read the
> something on the gcc site that slammed g95. But I read somewhere else that
> g95 was more advanced in their development.
> 
> After all the talk at the CDT summit about Fortran. I figured that I should
> probably play around with it and learn Fortran. Which path should I follow?
> 
> (Hope I'm not starting any toolchain wars...)
> 
> Thanks,
> Doug Schaefer
> Eclipse CDT Project Lead
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: photran-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:photran-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
>> Behalf Of Craig Rasmussen
>> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 9:41 AM
>> To: Photran Information
>> Subject: Re: [photran] running photran
>> 
>> 
>> On Oct 23, 2005, at 8:35 AM, Walt Brainerd wrote:
>> 
>>> I think it is better use of my time to finish reporting the bugs I
>>> am finding in g95 and gfortran by running my Fortran test suite.
>>> 
>> 
>> That's fine.
>> 
>> Are you going to SC this year?  I will have time after SC to work on
>> g95 integration.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Craig
>> 
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