[elektronjunge]

> wicked fast and devoid of bugs

Having ported a lot of old fortran to modern fortran and C I wish that were the case. More often than not, that's the assumption but its rarely true. There are some great lower level libraries like that *packs. But for the most part the performance and bug-freeness of these codes is more dogma than reality. For instance, in MCNP (a large monte-carlo neutronics package) a coworker of mine replaced the 70s era handrolled FFT function (which looked like someone was trying to write assembly in fortran) with a modern libary for 500%+ performance gain.