[cfe-dev] [OT] Re: Clang should natively support fortran

[C Bergström via cfe-dev]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 6:53 AM, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:
> On 06/22/2016 15:31, C Bergström wrote:
>
> This is going down a rabbit hole pretty far off topic, but the most
> sincere answer I can give
> --------
> Linux, OSX and Windows
>
> I'm a pretty strong Fortran advocate and even I wouldn't have any
> argument about trying to keep Fortran support in the FBSD base system.
> Why???!
>
> Does FBSD have optimized math libraries?
> GPGPU support?
> IB drivers support?
> Is anyone shipping HPC solutions for FreeBSD
> Is anyone actually testing the codes..
> (I won't even go into the kernel side of things..)
>
> In general I don't even know if typical common HPC codes will build on
> FBSD... I have a strong doubt anyone tests it.
>
> Time and energy is probably better spent focusing on improving things
> your community actually needs.
>
>
> I disagree.
>
>
> You seem to focus on the business use of the OS, and ignore some other uses.
> Do you know about Jupyter notebook software (http://jupyter.org)? It allows
> to create the interactive math- and physics-based books that allow the
> reader to explore and experiment with formulas and computations right inside
> the book? A lot of Jupyter uses fortran-based libraries in the background.

>From a user perspective jupyter appears to be a web app and you'd only
need Chrome or some modern browser.. (wait does FreeBSB even have
Chrome...). So unless I'm mistaken, this would only matter if their
servers are running FreeBSD. (Which I doubt)

> And Jupiter is a pretty cool thing. There is also the symbolic computer
> algebra Cadabra2 (http://cadabra.science) that also uses fortran in the
> background. And many other packages use fortran too.
>
>
> FreeBSD has a lot of advantages compared to Linux, OSX and Windows. For
> example, on FreeBSD you can have a 100% open source system

Licensing is a matter of opinion and not a technical merit. Please
lets not bring religion into the discussion.

, and all Linux
> distros always mix in some random third party-built binaries. This is a
> security risk. FreeBSD doesn't just grab the latest versions of packages
> from github like linux distros do. This is another security risk.

I'm very far from linux advocate, but this is disappointing FUD

You can't
> just blow this off, these are very significant advantages. And how can you
> make a case for the business use of Windows or OSX on a computation farm?

Windows and OSX Fortran is mostly from the development side. If you
were a scientist and actually writing Fortran code every day you may
understand this.


> Why add the licensing costs? It just doesn't make sense to me.
>
>
> Following your logic, nobody should do any new things because there is some
> gigantic industry already doing things some other way. Why even develop
> clang if there is gcc that already compiles everything fine?

Maybe this is just confusion between English and your native language..

I was just trying to say that FreeBSD probably has more important
things to focus on. Even if clang had Fortran support, I doubt anyone
would use FreeBSD as their platform for building a cluster or
scientific codes development.