[dagw]

Does Fortran still have any real advantage over Julia, MATLAB, etc.?

Performance. Fortran is much still faster than Julia, MATLAB etc.

It's also much easier to write fast Fortran compared to fast C. While C code written by an HPC expert will almost always be as fast as Fortran written by an expert, C written by "mediocre" C programmer who is a domain expert solving a problem in the most obvious way, will basically always be slower than Fortran code written be an equally "mediocre" Fortran programmer.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Fortran isn't faster than Julia. most comparisons I've seen are ties or Julia wins as long as both implementations are somewhat competent.

Fortran actually makes it fairly hard to write fast code since it is missing some features. for example, I don't believe there is any way to write a fortran program using Bfloat16 numbers. you also don't have great ability to write programs with a mix of strict ieee semantics and fastmath semantics. you have to choose 1 as a compile time flag.

[cookieperson]

If you are ignoring the cost of the compiler, and a whole host of other things - sure. But the same can be said for most any modern programming language. A lot of Julia's public benchmarks are not idiomatic Julia or packages were created to elide how nonidiomatic they are. Julia isn't a slouch after precompilation, but the time to burn in code can be longer than the runtime and the compilation time of the code in other languages by orders of magnitude. It's great for academic benchmarks though! Huge pain for CI and development.

[ChrisRackauckas]

Are you not talking about Julia v1.9? Packages precompile to binaries (.so/.dll) in this release, and will support direct calls pretty soon. It sounds like you're talking about a much older Juila.

> A lot of Julia's public benchmarks are not idiomatic Julia or packages were created to elide how nonidiomatic they are.

??? https://docs.sciml.ai/SciMLBenchmarksOutput/stable/MultiLang... this is pretty standard code.

I do enjoy programming in Fortran but let's at least keep it concrete and to reality. The older Fortran versions do have a small amount of optimizations that are hard to perform in other languages because the lack of aliasing can make difficult to prove optimizations possible. But the newer Fortran versions don't optimize as well without forcing things like ivdep, which is similar to Julia, which is why you tend to get the same/similar machine code between LFortran and Julia (since both are using the same compiler, LLVM).

[cookieperson]

If by much older you mean the current stable Julia release than sure... As of today Julia 1.8.5 is the stable release. So this post is traditional Julia community stuff.. "it works and everything is perfect you're the problem. We didn't create our own message board and stop posting in other places to try to control the narrative". Gas light city.

I wasn't referring to package benchmarks, my apologies if that was unclear.

[nojonestownpls]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. I love Julia as a language (not as an implementation, which is a pain-in-the-ass to work with), but there has long been a pattern of responses which in practice amount to gaslighting. Afaik it's only small set of people who do that, and charitably they're likely just being less-than-thoughtful about generalizing their "work for my project", "works on my 24 core computer", "works when I know half the people developing packages" experiences to everyone. But to an outsider, it looks like the answer is always "the problems are all fixed now, you're just out of date", and most of the time that turns out not to be true.

[cookieperson]

More than half the community feels that way the other half are either sycophants or don't care. It's not like it's one person either, it's the language maintainers general attitude. It's been called out in the past but it sure hasn't changed because there's a product to sell.

[TheRealKing]

Your benchmarks are not concrete and realistic. I have never seen any language but (unsurprisingly) Julia, to compare its performance with the performance of other languages by calling those languages from within the host language. Definitely 15000 times faster than MATLAB as claimed by JuliaComputing can be achieved with such seemingly concrete and realistic benchmarks. LLVM has benefited and learned so much from Fortran and its compilers. But free food and service are always undervalued.

[ChrisRackauckas]

> Definitely 15000 times faster than MATLAB as claimed by JuliaComputing can be achieved with such seemingly concrete and realistic benchmarks.

I believe you're talking about NASA Launch Services engineers claiming Julia's ModelingToolkit simulations outperformed Simulink by 15,000x? That claim was of course not made by Julia Computing or anyone affiliated by Julia Computing, which is pretty clear because the person who makes the claim very clearly describes his affiliation at the beginning of the video. The source is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQpqsmwlfY0, at 12:55. You did watch the whole video to understand the application and the caveats etc. instead of just reading the headline and immediately coming to a conclusion, right?

[adgjlsfhk1]

The benchmarks on Julia's website are ones that take around 1 second. The couple nanoseconds of call overhead doesn't matter.

[TheRealKing]

It is not just about call overhead. It is about a whole suite of aggressive optimizations only possible for a whole program. Point to one person or entity in the world who calls SUNDIALS Julia wrapper to bind their C production code to SUNDIALS. If you cannot, you have two options: 1. make your Julia benchmarks concrete and realistic or 2. cease and desist from pointless advocacy of your employer (JuliaComputing) and its benchmarks in public forums.

[adgjlsfhk1]

precompile costs are 1 time. if you want to deploy, you build a sysimage and ship that. startup time is then about .5 seconds.

[cookieperson]

They are one time per instance. Which isn't the same thing as one time. Julia sysimages are huge and take a long time to generate even on decent hardware. Last I checked that whole process was very janky, poorly documented, and under heavy revision(as it had been for years prior).

[adgjlsfhk1]

it's not. once you generate it somewhere you can just copy the files to anywhere that has the same architecture.

sysimages are huge (but they've gotten a decent bit smaller recently). notably, 1.8 added some features that let you make them a bunch smaller for deployment. you can now remove the metadata (i.e source code text) which saves about 20%, and you can also generate it from a Julia launched with -g0 to remove debug info (Julia unlike C includes debug info by default because stack traces are nice). we also recently fixed a really dumb bug that was causing libraries to be duplicated in sysimages, so that will sometimes save a few dozen mb. (who knew that tar duplicates symlinks?)

When did you last check? it's now pretty dejankified and has been for about a year. the docs aren't perfect, but I think they're relatively good.

[cookieperson]

People have been saying "it's better" for 3 years now. One things for sure, I'm not going to go recheck this again, anytime soon. Anything I'll say at this point will be met with "it's better now" and then I'll have to go find out it's really not in classic Julia fashion. The docs for package compiler were awful for about 2 years. See my above comment and other users jumping as to how annoying it is.

Fun Julia story. I remember one time someone, I believe from Julia computing(iirc) was telling me how much better Julia had gotten at something. They sent me links to academic flag plant repositories that had no code in them. Literally empty packages with no branches even with statement of purposes readmes. I offered to work on it and was met with... Academic competition about how I shouldn't do that because a package already existed for it, and how I should try to work with the author on theirs. Meanwhile I already had code for it, it just never went into the ecosystem. I'm highly unlikely to start investigating Julia again in the short term. Maybe in five years.

[rightbyte]

What edge does Fortran really have over GCC C with GNU extensions? If you can use the restroct keyword, are there any speed differences left?

[p_l]

You're escaping the "mediocre programmer" level then.