Abstract
A community of developers has formed to modernize the Fortran ecosystem. In this article, we describe the high-level features of Fortran that continue to make it a good choice for scientists and engineers in the 21st century. Ongoing efforts include the development of a Fortran standard library and package manager, the fostering of a friendly and welcoming online community, improved compiler support, and language feature development. The lessons learned are common across contemporary programming languages and help reduce the learning curve and increase adoption of Fortran.
Community
Fortran's computational performance was never the problem. The ecosystem was.
This paper surveys the Fortran-lang community's efforts to fix that: fpm (a cargo-like package manager), stdlib (a standard library), a package registry, modern documentation tools, and the Discourse forum that replaced scattered mailing lists.
We also assess compiler support for Fortran 2018 features across gfortran, ifort, ifx, flang, and NAG. Support remains uneven, particularly for coarrays and parameterized derived types.
The paper reflects the perspective of community members actively building these tools. My involvement: maintaining f2py (NumPy's Fortran-Python bridge) and contributing to fpm and stdlib.
Fortran still handles the tight numerical inner loops of scientific computing better than alternatives. Whether it continues to be used depends on whether the ecosystem keeps improving.
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