2011/6/19 "C. Bergström" <cbergst...@pathscale.com>: > In this case I serve the end user/community and not directly open source. > Why? Would it be good for Fortran if a F2K3 front-end was freely available > under a commercially friendly license? (This is a deeper question I'd love > feedback on)
From my point of view a freely available F2K compiler is the only hope for something like a "Fortran community" to keep exisiting (or even for the language itself to survive). Of course this does not mean at all that there is no space for high-quality commercial compilers. I even think that the commercial compiler vendors might profit from the existence of a freely available compiler. Note that right now we have barely *any* compiler which can claim to have a complete F2K implementation (though a few are quite close). Among the freely available ones, gfortran is surely the one which is closest. > a. I see people moving away from Fortran and more towards C++. (Sorry no > empirical data to back this, but how do we stop this trend) This is surely true. The only way to stop it is to provide a Fortran implementation of those features that make C++ so attractive (e.g. object orientation, etc). Such an implementation must be freely available and on the same quality level as, say, g++. > d. Would there be any negative impact to gfortran if PGI/Intel took the > front-end? (Or even worse PathScale *gasp*) What exactly do you mean by "taking" the front-end? > Not all commercial companies are bad (Redhat, Canonical.. etc). From my > perspective it's commercial companies that generally pay people to work full > time and get real engineering in open source done. Agreed. Another example being Google, which helped me a lot to contribute to gfortran (via several Summer of Code stipends). > If you have concerns about PathScale email me privately. My intention is to > vet the codebase. Vetting g95 is relatively easy, but there's a chasm > between it and gfortran I'm trying to map. If that's successful I'd like to > figure out if/how PathScale can contribute. if we continue to get much more > negatively this early on (I don't care the reason). I'll just forget the > whole thing. If you want this discussion to take a more positive direction, maybe you should try to explain your intentions a bit more clearly instead of making cloudy allusions. What exactly are you aiming for? Cheers, Janus