I used to create codes in Fortran for CFD simulations in Microsoft Studio platform. However now retired, I am looking for the best free download compiles available. Which one is a good solution in this case?
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Try gfortran, the most mature and commonly used open-source compiler. Other compilers are listed here. It’s good to use more than one compiler, and besides gfortran I use ifx.
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What is Microsoft Studio platform?
Intel’s ifx compiler is also good and costs you $0.00, There are also at least 2 different compilers called flang. The one I use is from AMD. It’s not as up to date with modern Fortran as gfortran and ifx. I also use lfortran but its error messages often don’t tell you where the problem was in your program, and it still lacks many standard Fortran features.
My personal favourite is Silverfrost FTN95 with its native IDE Plato. Plato can also be configured to compile gFortran and iFort, allowing allowing rapid testing of source code with all three compiler.
Silverfrost FTN95 despite its name, does implement many features of later Fortran standards.
There is a free version available for personal and evaluation purposes.
LLVM Flang is currently the most robust and feature-complete compiler that I use with the exception of the parallel programming features, which my group and our collaborators are working on adding. I recently went through a roughly 15-month period in which I averaged about one compiler bug report per week. In all that time, only one or two of the bugs that I encountered were in LLVM Flang.
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But LLVM Flang is not available on Windows, right? The OP is targetting Windows I think.
I don’t know the status of support for Windows. It should be available for Windows Subsystem for Linux and given that it builds with CMake, it might be possible that it builds on Windows, but I don’t know the answer.
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It is, for example, available via msys2. I do however, not know whether it is as mature as on Linux and do not think that it integrates seamlessly into MS Visual Studio like the Intel compilers.
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Hi @Falcao, and welcome to the discourse group.
Just to echo Beliavsky’s response: gfortran is a very mature, reliable, open-source compiler you can’t go wrong with in virtually all cases. Although I also worked a lot with NAG and Intel compilers, gfortran has been my top choice and go-to compiler for a long time now and I haven’t had any real complaints there.
Hi Damian I use the amd version of flang under 2 flavours of wsl. One under ubuntu and one under opensuse. works pretty well.