Fortran is the oldest high-level programming language that remains in use today and is one of the dominant languages used for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications. However, Fortran has not kept up with the modern software development practices and tooling in the internet era. As a consequence, the Fortran developer experience has diminished. Specifically, lack of a rich general-purpose library ecosystem, modern tools for building and packaging Fortran libraries and applications, and online learning resources, has made it difficult for Fortran to attract and retain new users. To address this problem, an open source community has formed on GitHub in 2019 and began to work on the initial set of core tools: a standard library, a build system and package manager, and a community-curated website for Fortran. In this paper we report on the progress to date and outline the next steps.
翻译:Fortran是当今仍在使用的最古老的高层次编程语言之一,是计算密集科学和工程应用的主要语言之一,然而,Fortran没有跟上互联网时代现代软件开发做法和工具的步伐,因此Fortran开发者的经验已经减少,特别是缺乏丰富的一般用途图书馆生态系统、建造和包装Fortran图书馆和应用的现代工具以及在线学习资源,使得Fortran难以吸引和保留新的用户。为了解决这一问题,2019年在GitHub上建立了一个开放源码社区,并开始开发最初的一套核心工具:一个标准图书馆、一个建筑系统和软件包管理员,以及一个面向Fortran的社区浏览网站。我们在本文件中汇报了迄今为止的进展并概述了下一步。