[4thaccount]

It's very fast and there is a new Manning book about to come out on Modern Fortran that is all about parallel Fortran.

In addition to being fast, I find it considerably easier to read than C++ as it isn't as low level and doesn't have as much noise (at least the later versions like Fortran 90).

It also makes writing numerical code easy as it was truly built for high performance scientific computing.

A lot of older scientific projects run on Fortran and although I know some projects that were migrated to C++, it wasn't due to any defect from the language besides it not being taught very often in colleges now outside of some astrophysics classes where it was once a mainstay in engineering and science curriculums.

There are several compilers available, but a lot of them are commercial and some are expensive. There are free versions as well of course.

[eru]

Though the main reason (for a while) that Fortran compilers could produce faster code was that they were allowed to assume that variables (including arguments to your functions) don't alias each other.

See http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/faster_than_C.html

[Ragib_Zaman]

I don't understand the "Though" part of this. The only reason any compiled language may be faster than another is because a compiler knows/assumes more about the code (either through users specification, or restrictions of the language).

[eru]

Yes. That's the remaining reason when compilers for the languages in question have gotten as good as they can get.

[gnufx]

The advantages of the proprietary compilers are quite over-sold. GNU Fortran is pretty good, and distinctly more reliable than some. (I don't have experience of the LLVM-based ones.)