On Sep 22, 2009, at 5:04 PM, Jack Howarth wrote:
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 04:43:14PM -0500, Brian Barnes wrote:
Regarding the discussion about gcc 4.5.0 problems on darwin and the
back-and-forth between Toby and Jack:
I have just now caught up on this thread, and I want to echo my
support
of pretty much everything Jack Howarth has said. I'm a long time
user of
gcc/gfortran for high performance scientific computing. The HPC world
essentially revolves around two compiler suites: gcc and intel
(although
a few other commercial compilers still have notable followings). Both
perform well on linux and OS X. Only one of them is free. If gcc (and
hence, gfortran) support on OS X and macports is allowed to
stagnate and
die, there will be no viable free option for modern Fortran
compilation
on OS X. g95 is simply too slow and based on too old of a gcc
codebase
to warrant consideration.
Fortran is not a 'dead' language or standard. There are many
features of
Fortran 2003 which are still being implemented in gfotran, and
essentially all of the Fortran 2008 standard (co-arrays!) still
needs to
be implemented. The llvm/clang community appears to have nobody /
very
few people interested in implementing a Fortran front-end, and the
gfortran maintainers are not going to branch out and start
contributing
to clang. Fortran is still used every day in scientific computing
and the
availability of a modern gcc/gfortran on OS X is a major reason I use
macports, and, in fact, and am able to use my Mac for work at all
(without shelling out for the Intel compilers). It is very
important to
the HPC community that macports/Apple keeps the latest gcc up-to-
date and
available!
Brian
p.s. ... I have patched the latest openmpi Portfile on my local
machine,
making the obvious changes to allow it to use gcc44 instead of
gcc43 (the
port seems stagnant). Compile + install went fine.
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Heh, it's kinda late now. We just got depreciated as a primary target
today...
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-09/msg01523.html
and they are already queuing up to commit patches which will
break the darwin builds...
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-09/msg01545.html
It will be interesting to see how helpful the other non-darwin
maintainers are without the requirement to support darwin as
a primary target.
Jack
Well, this has the potential to be an absolute disaster for the future
of gcc and Fortran on OS X. I am surprised that the GNU SC would
abandon an active part of its userbase like this. I do not like how
GNU licensing changes compared to the 4.2 days are turning out for OS
X users. Of course, in my perfect world Apple would put some money
into hiring people for Fortran work on clang/llvm, but really, why
should they care? Fortran will never make an impact on their
quarterly statements unless they plan on challenging linux in the HPC
world. It's not going to happen.
Terribly disappointing -- if this proceeds along the path of the worst-
case scenario, my next laptop may not be a Mac.
Brian
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