[llvm-dev] Adapting and open-sourcing PGI's Fortran frontend for LLVM

[Hal Finkel via llvm-dev]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alex Bradbury" <asb at asbradbury.org>
> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: "LLVM Dev" <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>, "flang-dev" <flang-dev at googlegroups.com>, "Rob Neely" <neely4 at llnl.gov>,
> "douglas miles (PGI)" <douglas.miles at pgroup.com>
> Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2015 1:41:08 AM
> Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Adapting and open-sourcing PGI's Fortran frontend for LLVM
> 
> On 13 November 2015 at 22:22, Hal Finkel via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have some very good news for everyone interested a
> > production-quality Fortran frontend for LLVM:
> >
> > The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security
> > Administration and its three national labs have reached an
> > agreement with NVIDIA's PGI division to adapt and open-source
> > PGI's Fortran frontend, and associated Fortran runtime library,
> > for contribution to the LLVM project. PGI is now working on
> > isolating the necessary frontend components from their existing
> > compiler code base and adapting those components to produce LLVM
> > IR for consumption by our existing infrastructure.
> >
> > We're expecting an initial source-code release from PGI by late
> > 2016, and while that's still far away, PGI's developers will be
> > working closely with the community to coordinate development
> > efforts by others interested in Fortran support (e.g. on ABI
> > support code for other platforms). Even before source code is
> > available, PGI is going to keep the community updated on their
> > progress. After source code is released, PGI will continue
> > development work in coordination with the community to implement
> > additional Fortran and OpenMP features not currently supported by
> > PGI Fortran. The frontend will use LLVM's infrastructure for
> > regression testing, and PGI will be developing regression tests
> > for these new features in accordance with our existing practice.
> 
> What will happen to flang development efforts?

This is obviously a somewhat-tricky question. There is an existing Flang code base and a few people have been working on it. Furthermore, it is still the only one we'll have for the next year. My hope is that, with the participation of the PGI developers, we'll be able to structure our Flang efforts on pieces that we'll be able to pick up and move to the code that PGI is releasing once that happens. Between development on the Driver, ABI support code, and testing and other infrastructure, the community can make substantial progress in 2016. By the end of 2016, we'll combine these pieces with PGI's code, and have a production-quality LLVM Fortran compiler representing the totality of this work.

 -Hal

> 
> Alex
> 

-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory