Toward Modern Fortran Tooling and a Thriving Developer Community

Abstract

Fortran is the oldest high-level programming language that remains in use today and is one of the dominant languages used for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications. However, Fortran has not kept up with the modern software development practices and tooling in the internet era. As a consequence, the Fortran developer experience has diminished. Specifically, lack of a rich general-purpose library ecosystem, modern tools for building and packaging Fortran libraries and applications, and online learning resources, has made it difficult for Fortran to attract and retain new users. To address this problem, an open source community has formed on GitHub in 2019 and began to work on the initial set of core tools: a standard library, a build system and package manager, and a communitycurated website for Fortran. In this paper we report on the progress to date and outline the next steps.

RPEM: Randomized Monte Carlo Parametric Expectation Maximization Algorithm

“…acknowledge Research Computing at Arizona State University for providing HPC and storage resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. R.C also acknowledge valuable help received from Fortran-lang community [36,37]. In particular, R.C.…”

“…Besides, unlike some other MCPEM algorithms, in RPEM the corresponding estimators Eq. (36) and Eq. ( 40) are unbiased estimators.…”

“…The error bar of the parameters µ k and Σ k in M-step are calculated by the standard deviation of the mean of the m uncorrelated samples in Eq. (36) and Eq. (40), due to central limit theorem which is one of the corner stones of all Monte Carlo simulations.…”

“…On the laptop, we take 5 × 10 6 total Metropolis trial moves (so each core took about one sixth of total trials) in Mstep, and took about m = 2500 uncorrelated samples for each element in µ k and Σ k as in Eq. (36). Considering the 2500 samples in M-step are sampled from the target distribution π(s) in Eq.…”

The State of Fortran

“…To address these issues, a new open source Fortran community called Fortran-lang was formed in December 2019 [8]. Its initial conception came about in the J3 Fortran Proposals repository on GitHub, described in a later section, where it became clear that there was a need for modern tooling and an improved web presence for the Fortran community.…”