Modern Fortran is no longer the FORTRAN from punch cards, having this compiler push maybe will help folks to write directly blazing performance Fortran code, instead of numerical code in Python.
A bit like C23 and C++23 are here, and the large majority is a mix of C89, C99, C++11, and C++17, as what folks in the trenches care about.
Or Java 8 versus Java 24, and so on.
Fortran is in a similar position.
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFortran
- Homepage: https://lfortran.org
- GitHub: https://github.com/lfortran/lfortran
If you like to play with it, see
- LFortran in web browsers using WebAssembly: https://dev.lfortran.org
- LFortran in Compiler Explorer: https://godbolt.org/z/EfWvsY6Kh
I am not getting a full picture here. What's challenging about PRIMA code base? Does it use some advanced features that are difficult for a compiler to support? Are the mentioned features in the 2008 standard?
What's actually impressive is that LFortran in alpha stage is only 2x slower than GFortran, which goes back decades.
https://labs.quansight.org/blog/building-scipy-with-flang
which was once discussed on HN at
https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/lfortran-compiles-pri...
- Become a sponsor to LFortran: https://github.com/sponsors/lfortran
- Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/lfortran
- NumFOCUS: https://numfocus.org/donate-to-lfortran
Roughly: 8, 12, 18 units of time, respectively. Python only being twice as slow for the simplest matmul - how much of that is merely the interpreter startup time?
