I wish Fortran the best. My shallow opinion is that, I do think for Fortran to thrive, it needs money. It needs to be (hopefully widely) used in many commercial software, especially on Windows. This is a big market. If big commercial software can heavily reply on Fortran, they may be able to and interested in bringing money to Fortran community and help keep making Fortran great.
Strucural mechanical simulations solvers
Abaqus, Ansys, LS-Dyna, Nastran. I think they cover at least 80 percent of commercial and even more academic market.
Many of the programs used at the interface between chemistry and physics (quantum chemistry, solid state physics) do rely on Fortran. A selection of them are listed in the English edition of Wikipedia. And this applies not only the old ones (like Gaussian) (though e.g., NWChem isn’t an example backed by a corporation).
I know about a few large (O(100k)-O(1M) LOC) commercial Fortran projects that are not publicly listed or disclosed as Fortran software. I can’t name them due to NDAs, unfortunately, so this response doesn’t directly answer the question. Large, multi-national enterprises with household names that most people have heard of. I suspect that there are many Fortran software in that kind of environment where you wouldn’t know it’s Fortran unless you were working directly on it.
I work on market-leading engineering software in a niche field. Our computation core of around 100k LOC in (mostly) modern Fortran and has a 40+ year heritage. The GUI and database are in C#. I won’t name the product but our use of Fortran isn’t a secret to our customers.
if the software is run on Windows, do you use gfortran or Intel Fortran?
I mean, if there is a chance if you use gfortran, its performance on Windows can be several times slower than on Linux. Have you seen such problem? if so how do you solve it?
Also do you use MPI on Windows?
In short, I mean how do you ensure the Fortran’s performance on Windows is about the same as on Linux? Because it seems to me, it is a problem everyone will face and need to solve, when developing software on Windows using Fortran.
Thanks.
We have compiled most of the code base with gfortran to look at the diagnostics. This has been useful. We have never put in the effort to build a working DLL, replace Intel MKL or fiddle with compiler flags to ensure the (reasonably complicated) datastructures are compatibile with C#.
I would like the option of building the product with gfortran as I have always benefited from comparing builds with different compilers and/or platforms. This is not a priority for management.
We don’t use MPI. The computational core is still serial. We have more work to do untangling the data structures before we can run parallel. We have a pathway and are getting there slowly.
We only support Windows, so we can’t compare the performance on linux.