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by DeepDuh 5002 days ago
That being said, Fortran is being used equally often, if not more often, in HPC applications. The reason being that modern Fortran both gives you bare bone access to the memory structures and offers array slicing notation as well as good multidimensional arrays for HPC. (C multidimensional arrays usually don't offer optimal performance, leading to the pointer arithmetic notation).

It's still an ugly language though. I've yet to find a C language extension that gives you the higher level features of Fortran however - and even then it would have to be an industry standard to be supported by the wealth of HPC compilers out there - remember it's not only x86, you also have GPUs, Itanium, PPC.. Looking forward to a world where LLVM actually gives the performance people need in that field, because architecture wise this could turn out to be a silver bullet.
2 comments
alexchamberlain 5002 days ago
The main reason Fortran is used is that medieval professors can't be bothered to learn C. There are less assumptions about pointers in Fortran - which means it can be parallelised more easily - but you can work round that in C.
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ams6110 5002 days ago
Fortran is not exactly a general purpose language though, it's specifically designed for the sorts of problems that scientific and HPC tends to deal with, and it's probably rare especially nowadays to see it used anywhere else. I'm guessing there aren't any web frameworks written in Fortran (though I'm sure someone will now point one out....)
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DeepDuh 5002 days ago
Web development with Fortran. Shudder. (String handling is abysmal in Fortran so I wouldn't wish that to my worst enemy).

No, but my parent was talking about deep code optimizations being almost exclusively being done in C. I'd say HPC is a significant market for code optimization, so I wanted to point out that Fortran is kind of the industry standard there.

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evoxed 5002 days ago
If I'm trapped on a desert island with (somehow) my MacBook and a solar charger, this will definitely be the first project I take one...
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wglb 5002 days ago
Well, it might surprise you to know that the first serious optimizing was written in fortran. In my book, compilers trump frameworks for generality.
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