Fortran 90 Notebook III

COMPUTING-BLOG
Scientific-computing Fortran

Notebook

List of libraries, compilers and editors of Fortran. The list is mainly focused to Modern Fortran but there are some resources also useful for Fortran 77 users.

Table of Contents

General information

Fortran is one of the oldest computer programming languages that is still alive. It is not a main language, but it has its niche in scientific applications. There are several blog entries that a I think useful to understand recent updates in the language itself. First in github f3-fortran there is a list of proposals that are related, as far as I understood, with LFortran new compiler.

Other important source of updates of fortran comunity is centralized in the fortran-lang github group. There you have a webpage fortran-lag.org where you can find news and information of the related projects. From them I highlight two: the fortran-package-manager fpm and the standard-lib. The last one relies on few python libraries to create an interesting tool.

For further information you can read two summaries at resurrecting-fortran and 1st-year of fortran-lang.

Tools

NameGoalLicenceDocsLink
findentBeautify f90, f2003 codeOpen-Sourceinfosourceforge
tags (ctags)Syntax higlightOpen-Sourceinfosourceforge
f2cFortran77 to C translatorOpen-Sourceinfocode
fortran-language-serversupport for editorsMITinfogithub
fntcheckcode checker F77   
gdbgnu debuggerGPL  
fpmpackage managerMITinfogithub

IDE

Here there is a list of text editors that I have tested myself. My main editor has been vim or neovim, now I am learning emacs (doom-emacs in particular). From time to time I use Geany which works well for many projects. For very large projects it might be worth to check Eclipse and Code-Blocks, as they have specific features of fortran. My recommendation if you are beginner is to try emacs or neovim.

NameKindLicenceDocsLink
GeanyGeneral IDEOpen-Source  
Code-BlocksSupport Fortran and COpen-Source  
Eclipse+PhotranFortran in EclipseOpen-Source  
Kate / Geditgeneral IDEOpen-Source  
Atomgeneral IDE (plugins)Open-Source  
EmacsTwo fortran modes (f77 & f90)Open-Source  
Visual Studiogeneral IDE (plugins)Open-Source  
Vim/Neovimwith vim-fortran pluginOpen-Source  
kakoune Open-Source  

Compilers

There are several compilers, here I list only those that are open-source. I use mostly gfortran although it is generaly consider that the intel fortran is a bit faster.

NameKindLicenceDocsLink
gfortranGCCOpen-Sourceinfoweb
LFortranLLVMOpen-Source web
FlangLLVMOpen-Source web