A Modern Fortran Scientific Programming Ecosystem
by Degenerate Conic aka @jacobwilliams
October 12, 2022
Historically, large general-purpose libraries have formed the core of the Fortran scientific ecosystem (e.g., SLATEC, or the various PACKS). Unfortunately, as I have mentioned here before, these libraries were written in FORTRAN 77 (or earlier) and remained unmodified for decades. The amazing algorithms continued within them imprisoned in a terrible format that nobody wants to deal with anymore. At the time they were written, they were state of the art. Now they are relics of the past, a reminder of what might have been if they had continued to be maintained and Fortran had continued to remain the primary scientific and technical programming language.
Over the last few years, I’ve managed to build up a pretty good set of modern Fortran libraries for technical computing. Some are original, but a lot of them include modernized code from the libraries written decades ago. The codes still work great (polyroots-fortran contains a modernized version of a routine written 50 years old), but they just needed a little bit of cleanup and polish to be presentable to modern programmers as something other than ancient legacy to be tolerated but not well maintained (which is how Fortran is treated in the SciPy ecosystem).
The post is being discussed at Reddit, comp.lang.fortran, and Hacker News. Thanks to Jacob Williams for his efforts.
