In our last blog post from May 2023, we announced that LFortran can compile legacy and modern Minpack. Today, we are happy to announce that LFortran can compile and run fastGPT.

This is the third code that LFortran can compile. The progress bar toward beta has progressed to 3/10.

LFortran is still alpha, meaning that users expect frequent bugs and breaking changes. Alpha users are enthusiastic partners in the effort to reach beta and they dilligently report issues. In beta, users will expect LFortran to compile their codes, but users will still be partners in reporting remaining issues.

Two days ago on April 30, 2023 was the 4th anniversary of LFortran’s initial release. Our initial prototype in 2019 was in Python. Since then we have rewritten to C++ for speed and robustness. In 2021 we announced an MVP.

In this update, we are happy to announce that LFortran can compile and run both legacy and modern Minpack. We’ll start off by taking a look at the current compilation status and benchmarks of minpack. From there, we’ll provide an overview of where LFortran is currently at and share our next steps going forward.

We recently open sourced LFortran, an interactive Fortran compiler built on top of LLVM that we have been developing for the last 1.5 years. It is a work in progress and at the link you can find what works already, what is planned and a roadmap.

Here is our motivation.

Why are almost no new scientific or engineering software projects started in Fortran?

Usually (in our neck of the woods) C++ is chosen instead. The following are the most cited reasons for such a choice: