It seems like the Fortran Playground at https://play.fortran-lang.org is broken. The attempt to run programs using the green “Play” button doesn’t produce any output, instead the cursor in the “Output” window continuously “circles”. This is consistent with MS-Edge 123.0.2420.81 and Firefox 124.0.2 on Windows 11 and with Firefox 96.0 on Linux.
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Yes, that’s a known issue: The playground does not work · Issue #65 · fortran-lang/playground · GitHub.
I think we should remove the link from https://fortran-lang.org/ until it is improved to be more reliable.
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If you and others agree, I think we should change the link to dev.lfortran.org. It’s not full Fortran but it works for what it supports.
I just went in to the playground server again and unfortunately the way its Docker is set up (or perhaps this is just how Docker works) has accumulated artifacts to fill the 20 GB space of the micro instance. I’m not familiar enough with Docker to configure it around this properly, but I cleaned up and rebooted the instance and now the Hello World example responds with:
<ERROR>*cmd_run*:package error:Package name is not provided, please add a name entry
STOP 1
This is an fpm error message complaining about name missing from fpm.toml and it’s not immediately clear to me why this is happening. I haven’t tried reproducing locally. It’s possibly related to limited resources of a micro instance (1/8 of a CPU I believe)
So until we have further contributions and improvements to the playground server (i.e. fixing up or removing the Docker layer and hardening against harmful code) and we can show that it can work sustainably, I suggest to point the Play link to a browser compiler (LFortran) or just remove it.
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At the time of this GSoC program completion, there was a push and enthusiasm to make it available publicly from the main Fortran-lang website, and I went with it. However, it was a mistake to release it as prominently, as it’s obviously far from ready for prime time.
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Yes, let’s use dev.lfortran.org for now. While it does not support all Fortran features yet, seems to be always working. And we are making good continual progress in supporting more and more of Fortran.
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