[cfe-dev] Need for new FORTRAN front-end for LLVM ?

[Mahesha HS]

Hello All,

I believe that Clang is now in par with other well known industry standard
compiler front-ends with compliant to standards, and also far better than
other compiler front-ends in few aspects. On the other hand, many industry
compiler vendors are started using LLVM internally in their compilers and
tools chain for one or the other purpose. Also, many high performance
server compiler vendors started looking into LLVM compiler due to various
reasons. As all of us know, FORTRAN was and is the language of choice for
developing high permanence (scientific) applications, for various known
reasons.

In this line, do you guys think, it is acceptable, if someone seriously
start supporting new FORTRAN front-end for LLVM? I understand that Clang,
being an umbrella for implementing C family of languages for LLVM, may not
cover well, the non C family languages like FORTRAN.

However, I am curious know about the thoughts (positive or negative) of
Clang community regarding this topic (need for new FORTRAN front-end for
LLVM). If you guys agree that there is a need for it, what is the best way
to go about implementing it?, I mean, do we need to completely separate it
from Clang project? Or is it possible and is it good to leverage some of
the Clang implementation here? In any case, in your experience, how much
effort and time duration is required to come-up with a well defined and
designed basic infrastructure implementation so that people who
are interested can start contributing to it?

I welcome your suggestions/evaluations, be it positive or negative,
regarding this topic.

-- 
mahesha
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