LFortran compiles PRIMA

[pjmlp]

Nice milestone.

Modern Fortran is no longer the FORTRAN from punch cards, having this compiler push maybe will help folks to write directly blazing performance Fortran code, instead of numerical code in Python.

[anta40]

The lang is still under development, the most current in in Fortran 2023: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-fortran-expla...

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I was given to believe that a lot of numerical code in python is fortran with a little bit of wrapper?

[genphy1976]

For more information about LFortran, see

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFortran

- Homepage: https://lfortran.org

- GitHub: https://github.com/lfortran/lfortran

If you like to play with it, see

- LFortran in web browsers using WebAssembly: https://dev.lfortran.org

- LFortran in Compiler Explorer: https://godbolt.org/z/EfWvsY6Kh

[andsoitis]

LFortran is an alpha-stage modern, interactive LLVM-based Fortran compiler.

[froh]

thanks you've saved me looking it up myself

[quanto]

> It utilizes a range of Modern Fortran features, including extensive use of optional variables, function pointer passing, and a randomized test driver, among others. Successfully compiling PRIMA requires a compiler with a robust and mature backend, as well as well-developed intermediate passes and a capable parser.

I am not getting a full picture here. What's challenging about PRIMA code base? Does it use some advanced features that are difficult for a compiler to support? Are the mentioned features in the 2008 standard?

What's actually impressive is that LFortran in alpha stage is only 2x slower than GFortran, which goes back decades.

[certik]

It was a lot of corner cases that we had to get right, it's the most advanced code that LFortran can compile. I think none of the features individually is difficult to support, but there were a lot of them.

[actinium226]

Congrats to Ondřej Čertík and the team working on LFortran, this is a big milestone!

[ggraphilia]

See

https://labs.quansight.org/blog/building-scipy-with-flang

which was once discussed on HN at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38196412

[pklausler]

That's not the same compiler.

[ggraphilia]

Discussions on the Fortran Discourse:

https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/lfortran-compiles-pri...

[genphy1976]

In case you appreciate LFortran and would like to sponsor its development, see

- Become a sponsor to LFortran: https://github.com/sponsors/lfortran

- Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/lfortran

- NumFOCUS: https://numfocus.org/donate-to-lfortran

[ggraphilia]

For PRIMA, see

https://github.com/libprima/prima

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[genewitch]

I'll have to benchmark a library-less Matmul with LFortran, to compare against flang, C, and python versions.

Roughly: 8, 12, 18 units of time, respectively. Python only being twice as slow for the simplest matmul - how much of that is merely the interpreter startup time?