Fortran newsletter: February 2022#

Welcome to the February 2022 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

fortran-lang.org#

Here’s what’s new and ongoing in the fortran-lang.org repo:

  • #369: Resolves Issue #217

  • #359: Fix time calculation in the PRs script

Work in progress#

  • #347 (WIP): Fortran Intrinsics

Let us know if you have any suggestions for the website and its content. We welcome any new contributors to the website and the tutorials page in particular - see the contributor guide for how to get started.

Fortran Standard Library#

Here’s what’s new in stdlib:

  • #276: Probability Distribution and Statistical Functions – Exponential Distribution Module

  • #605: [stdlib_math] Add function diff

  • #613: Ignore hash testing binaries and logs

  • #617: Made format constant public

  • #622: Fix Gauss quadrature

Work in progress#

  • #611 (WIP): Hash maps

  • #604 (WIP): Add get_argument, get_variable and set_variable

  • #580 (WIP): Add terminal and color escape sequences

  • #552 (WIP): fixed bug in stringlist

  • #536 (WIP): Fix conversion warnings

  • #520 (WIP): [stdlib_io] add disp(display variable values formatted).

  • #517 (WIP): adding SPEC_TEMPLATE.md #504

  • #514 (WIP): pop, drop & get with basic range feature for stringlist

  • #491 (WIP): Stdlib linked list

  • #473 (WIP): Error stop improvements

  • #363 (WIP): Sorting string’s characters according to their ASCII values

  • #286 (WIP): Probability Distribution and Statistical Functions – Beta Distribution Module

  • #278 (WIP): Probability Distribution and Statistical Functions – Gamma Distribution Module

  • #189 (WIP): Initial implementation of COO / CSR sparse format

Please help improve stdlib by testing and reviewing pull requests!

The candidate for file system operations to be included in stdlib is being developed by @MarDiehl and @arjenmarkus in this repository. Please try it out and let us know how it works, if there are any issues, or if the API can be improved.

Fortran Package Manager#

Here’s what’s new in fpm:

Work in progress#

  • #654 (WIP): Ignore hidden source files

  • #653 (WIP): Enable profiles in toml

  • #652 (WIP): Get user name and email using got config if available else use defaults

  • #648 (WIP): Add note about relocation of manifest reference

  • #622 (WIP): Cleanup the backend output

  • #608 (WIP): –env switch lets you specify the prefix of the compiler-related environment variables

  • #539 (WIP): Add parent packages into dependency tree

  • #498 (WIP): Compiler flags profiles

fpm is still in early development and we need as much help as we can get. Here’s how you can help today:

  • Use it and let us know what you think! Read the fpm packaging guide to learn how to build your package with fpm, and the manifest reference to learn what are all the things that you can specify in the fpm.toml file.

  • Browse existing fpm packages on the fortran-lang website

  • Browse the open issues and see if you can help implement any fixes or features.

  • Adapt your Fortran package for fpm and submit it to the Registry.

  • Improve the documentation.

The short-term goal of fpm is to make development and installation of Fortran packages with dependencies easier. Its long term goal is to build a rich and decentralized ecosystem of Fortran packages and create a healthy environment in which new open source Fortran projects are created and published with ease.

Compilers#

Flang#

Recent development updates:

  • FIR

    • Keep runtime function name in comment

    • Add a conversion for !fir.coordinate_of

    • Add a new memory allocation rewrite pass.

    • Correct and reenable test that was removed by MLIR.

    • Fix overallocation by fir-to-llvm-ir pass

  • OpenMP

    • Add some semantic checks for threadprivate and declare target directives

  • Simplify RaggedArrayHeader and make it plain C struct

  • Fix folding of ac-implied-do indices in structure constructors

  • Avoid code duplication in mixed expressions

  • Add test with shape for allocmem and freemem

  • Make the frontend driver error out when requesting multiple actions

  • Add semantics tests for co_reduce, co_min, and co_max

  • Use GNUInstallDirs to support custom installation dirs.

  • Enable support for conversion of recursive record types

  • Separate temporary and user-specified object files

  • update to reflect MLIR LLVM::GEPOp changes

  • Do not lose call in shape inquiry on function reference

  • Fix the documentation on how to build flang

  • Add tests for converting arrays and refs to arrays

  • Make the “flang” wrapper script check the Bash version

  • Fix handling of space between # and name in preprocessor stringification

  • RESHAPE(PAD=) can be arbitrary array rank

  • Any type can appear in a structure constructor for an unlimited polymorphic allocatable component

  • Implement semantics for DEC STRUCTURE/RECORD

  • Extension: initialization of LOGICAL with INTEGER & vice versa

  • Allow initialization in blank COMMON

  • Support extension intrinsic function variations on ABS

  • Allow pointers to non-sequence types in sequence types

  • “CFI” types for Fortran REAL and COMPLEX kinds 2, 3, 10, 16

  • Legacy extension: non-character formats

  • Signal runtime error on WRITE after ENDFILE

  • Don’t blank-fill remaining lines in internal output

  • Accept ENTRY names in generic interfaces

  • Support substring references in NAMELIST input

Call notes are recorded and available upon request here. Please contact Alexis Perry-Holby at aperry@lanl.gov for document access.

LFortran#

Compiling stdlib with lfortran

Addition of ASR Optimization Passes

libasr

Miscellaneous

Contributors

We are looking for new contributors. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested. We will help you get up to speed.

Events#

  • fpm has a new documentation website hosted at fpm.fortran-lang.org. This website will provide user-oriented tutorials and how-to guides, as well as developer-oriented reference documents and specifications. We welcome all contributions to the fpm documentation, including translations to other languages. Please visit the fpm-docs repo to get started.

  • We had our 22st Fortran Monthly call on January 17. You can watch the recording below:

As usual, subscribe to the mailing list and/or join the Discourse to stay tuned with the future meetings.

Contributors#

We thank everybody who contributed to fortran-lang in the past month by commenting in any of these repositories:

Fortran newsletter: January 2022   Fortran newsletter: March 2022