Newbie Help Needed (How to Contribute to Fortran)

Hi all! Im new here and would like to contribute to Fortran. id love to have tips for how to start, look at the codebase and any prerequisites. Thanks!

2 Likes

Hey, @CowardlyDog_AdityaP.

Welcome to the discourse and the community! What type of projects would you be interested in?

Some starting points:

  • A good place to start getting an overview is to look at the Fortran-lang GitHub page. You will see the repos of 2 of the biggest flagship projects at the top: the new de-facto standard library (stdlib), and the fortran package manager (fpm). Each have a contributor guide, which can help you get started (CONTRIBUTING.md in the respective repo root directories).
  • A useful tool to familiarise yourself with is the fypp preprocessor. It will explain some of the non-Fortran code you see in stdlib, for example. Since this can be distracting when first viewing the codebase, you can check out the stdlib-fpm branch instead.
  • If compiler development interests you, the LLVM-based LFortran may be woth a look. LFortran is bringing interactivity and fast prototyping to Fortran. I am sure @certik would be happy to explain more about how you could contribute.
  • What Fortran also lacks a little compared to other languages are good, accessible and general tutorials. There are excellent resources on the Fortran-lang website, but there is always room to enrich the Fortran tutorial landscape.
  • General: A good way to get an overview of what’s going on (and where help is needed) is to review issues and pull-requests on GitHub.

That’s only a snapshot of projects you could contribute to. I am sure others can highlight more for you.

P.S. I took the liberty to modify the threat title slightly to better match your message.

4 Likes