The State of Fortran
Laurence Kedward, Bálint Aradi, Ondřej Čertı́k, Milan Curcic, Sebastian Ehlert, Philipp Engel, Rohit Goswami, Michael Hirsch, Asdrubal Lozada-Blanco, Vincent Magnin, Arjen Markus, Emanuele Pagone, Ivan Pribec, Brad Richardson, H.J. Snyder, John Urban, Jérémie Vandenplas
Abstract
A community of developers has formed to modernize the Fortran ecosystem. In this article, we describe the high-level features of Fortran that continue to make it a good choice for scientists and engineers in the 21st century. Ongoing efforts include the development of a Fortran standard library and package manager, the fostering of a friendly and welcoming online community, improved compiler support, and language feature development. The lessons learned are common across contemporary programming languages and help reduce the learning curve and increase adoption of Fortran.