LFortran

LFortran has evolved rapidly since its inception and is now close to beta status. Several key project progress goals are on track with the help of external support; and the recent GSoD support will galvanize the documentation and ease the onboarding of new contributors to the language and LFortran’s unique tooling.

At the heart of the L-family of compilers (LFortran, LPython) lies the idea that there are invariants across languages which can be documented and worked with. To this end, LFortran has decided to kick-start a sustained period of documentation generation for both the Fortran language (in terms of compiler implementation records) and the ASR itself. The relatively higher technical debt required for the task at the moment made it inefficient to look too far away from the existing community, and Rohit Goswami and Tapasweni Pathak will be the two technical writers for this 2022 season of documentation. You can look at our GSoD proposal for more details.

After a little over 2 years from our initial announcement, we are releasing LFortran MVP today.

We have set our goal to release MVP in September 2021. We were initially hoping to compile at least some production codes for MVP. While we did not quite get there yet, after wrapping up and documenting where we are and writing a demo Fortran project that works with the MVP, it turns out LFortran is already quite usable and it can compile quite a lot of computational Fortran code if you are willing to work around some of the current limitations. In this blog post we will describe in detail the current status of LFortran.