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Re: Intel f90 compiler for Debian.



Matthias Urlichs <smurf@smurf.noris.de> writes:

> Hi, Lukas Geyer wrote:
> 
> > As an
> > aside, I don't quite understand why Fortran is still so popular in the
> > numerical mathematics community... :)
> 
> There still are a lot of Fortran libraries which people are used to,
> and they have been heavily optimized over the years.
> 
> The sad trutz is also that historically, since C is a language where any
> pointer can point anywhere, some optimizations which are rather obvious in
> Fortran compilers are difficult if not impossible in C. This has changed
> somewhat (C99), but ...

I thought that all or most of these libraries had C bindings in the
meantime. And for optimization purposes, it might not be as easy to do
in C, but there have always been options like -fstrict-aliasing and
such. However, that is probably not so much an issue if the C
functions are just wrappers for the Fortran library. People who want
the last percent in optimization would probably not use gcc anyway,
but some sort of vendor-optimized compiler for the respective
architecture they are using.

Lukas



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