Anybody know of the best free Fortran compiler currently out ?

[Amber Roxanna]

I'm new to fortran and am currently learning the language. Thought my experience would be more pleasant with a a good fortran compiler. Anyone know of any open-source / free compiler and can you please attach the download link. thanks

 

[startover]

gcc

 

[cgorac]

If you're on Linux (or Mac, with Xcode installed) then, as said by previous poster, GCC is already there for you - to call Fortran compiler front-end, use "gfortran" command from the shell. If you're on Windows, and used to Visual Studio, then FTN95 may be interesting for you. Furthermore, many commercial Fortran compiler vendors (like Intel, Portland Group, etc.) provide free versions for personal use. And there are other options too, like for example G95. As I mentioned in another post some time ago - the market of Fortran compilers is rather healthy and diverse.

As for learning the language, for quick overview of basic stuff I'd recommend this tutorial; and out of books available, I still like Fortran 95/2003 for Scientists & Engineers, by Stephen Chapman, most.

 

[alain]

The question is, why are you learning FORTRAN? Any specific reason? or just "for the fun of it"?

 

[Amber Roxanna]

The question is, why are you learning FORTRAN? Any specific reason? or just "for the fun of it"?

I'm learning it for a graduate program i'm applying to which requires a scientific computing language. I already have a solid grasp of C++ and had a little extra time on my hands, so I thought i'd pick up FORTRAN along the way. There is no such thing as too much programming, lol.

 

[alain]

I'm learning it for a graduate program i'm applying to which requires a scientific computing language. I already have a solid grasp of C++ and had a little extra time on my hands, so I thought i'd pick up FORTRAN along the way. There is no such thing as too much programming, lol.

I will advice you against learning FORTRAN unless the graduate program you are applying requires it specifically or the field of study that you choose has already a big codebase in FORTRAN. As a programming language, FORTRAN is far from ideal.

 

[cgorac]

I will advice you against learning FORTRAN unless the graduate program you are applying requires it specifically or the field of study that you choose has already a big codebase in FORTRAN. As a programming language, FORTRAN is far from ideal.

I completely disagree: I think in case OP intend to get involved into any sort of numerical programming, choosing to learn Fortran is very good decision. With all of the recent updates of the standard, Fortran is now a modern imperative programming language, and having built-in, high-performance support for vector calculations makes it the most powerful language for numerical work out of any of the commonly used general-purpose programming languages. Furthermore, most of libraries for numerical work are written in Fortran and for calling from Fortran, and Fortran also have first-class support for all of the important parallel programming APIs, like MPI, OpenMP and CUDA.

So - all in all: if your career path is going to include lots of programming, it would be certainly good to plan to learn some more programming languages, like Python or Matlab or some sort of functional programming language. But learning Fortran at this point is right thing to do, as you'll learn to do numerical work the right way, and you'll also remember to appreciate performance of your codes possible to gain with Fortran. But it's also very important to carefully choose materials to learn from, to spare yourself learning obfuscated warts of the language that are not to be used in newly written Fortran codes, and I think links I provided in my post above may be helpful in that regard.

 

[Tsotne]

I agree with crogac. Operating systems for supercomputersare also written on fortran as I know.

 

[cgorac]

I agree with crogac. Operating systems for supercomputersare also written on fortran as I know.

No, that statement is completely wrong: most supercomputer machines run Linux (see here), that is in turn written in C; Fortran is the best language for numerical programming, but it is not used for system programming - C rules there.

 

[Tsotne]

I have read something about fortran OSs. I'll search for the article again

 

[dynamicD]

Some excellent technical reasons for Fortran posted here. It's parallel computing and MP features are ahead of the curve. However my most recent search of quant jobs with Fortran as a keyword was a bit disappointing. C++ still seems to be the language of choice in the financial quant world. I am beginning to think that most of the managers hiring for these quant jobs are probably coming from a time when C++ was considered to be THE language for quant/financial applications and therefore heavily promoted and taught. If your only training was C++ would you consider hiring Fortran experts that could do HPC? How would you be able to manage such a team with no in-depth knowledge of the language? You'd probably find yourself looking for another job soon. C++ has an established reputation as being the "go to" language in the quant world and for this reason it's a safe choice both for managers and quants, even though a higher performance trading system could be built using modern Fortran.