The purpose of the GNU Fortran (GFortran) project is to develop the Fortran compiler front end and run-time libraries for GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GFortran development is part of the GNU Project. We seek to bring free number crunching to a broad spectrum of platforms and users.
In particular, the project wishes to reach users of the Fortran language, be it in the scientific community, education, or commercial environments. The GFortran compiler is fully compliant with the Fortran 95 Standard and includes legacy F77 support. In addition, a significant number of Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 features are implemented. Please give it a try. If you encounter problems, contact us at the mailing list or file a problem report.
GFortran development follows the open development process. We do this to attract a diverse team of developers and to ensure that GFortran works on multiple architectures and diverse environments. We always need more help. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at fortran@gcc.gnu.org. (Also check out our mailing lists page)
For additional info on GFortran developments, you may find the GFortran wiki useful. Anyone may contribute information to the wiki. (Neither copyright paperwork nor a patch review process is required.)
The GNU Project is about providing source code for its programs. For convenience, a number of people regularly build binaries for different platforms. Links to these can be found at the wiki. Most of the binary executables are the latest development snapshots of GFortran and are provided to encourage testing. We also want new users, from students to masters of the art of Fortran, to try GFortran. It really is a great compiler!
We strive to provide a high quality Fortran compiler that works well on a variety of native targets. This means:
Conformance to Fortran standards, primarily Fortran 95, 2003, and 2008
Performance of executables and computational accuracy
Reasonable compile speed and cross compilation capability
Good diagnostics and debugging features
Legacy code support where practical.
The initial goal of the GNU Fortran Project was construction of a Fortran 95 compiler that complies with the ISO Fortran 95 Programming Language standard [ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997(E)]. We are now well into F2003 and F2008 features. The GFortran wiki and our bug tracker list features under development or yet to be implemented. Compiler capability is quite extensive and includes nearly all g77 features. We highly encourage users to move from g77, which is no longer maintained, and start taking advantage of GFortran's modern features. Legacy g77 code will compile fine in almost all cases.
We regularly update the status of the front end and run-time library development.
We encourage everyone to contribute changes and help test GNU Fortran. GNU Fortran is developed on the mainline of GCC and has been part of the compiler collection since the 4.0.0 release. We provide read access to our development sources for everybody by anonymous SVN. If you do not have SVN access (for instance if you are behind a firewall prohibiting the SVN protocol), you might want to download snapshots.
Contributions will be reviewed by at least one of the following people:
Paul Brook
Steven Bosscher
Bud Davis
Jerry DeLisle
Toon Moene
Tobias Schlueter
Janne Blomqvist
Steve Kargl
Thomas Koenig
Paul Thomas
Janus Weil
Daniel Kraft
Daniel Franke
Under the rules specified below:
All normal requirements for patch submission (assignment of copyright to the FSF, testing, ChangeLog entries, etc) still apply, and reviewers should ensure that these have been met before approving changes.
Approval should be necessary for patches which don't fall under the obvious rule. So, with the approver list put in place, everybody (except maintainers) should still seek approval for his/her patches. We have found the mutual peer review process really works well.
Patches should only be reviewed by people who know the affected parts of the compiler. (i.e. the reviewer has to be sure he/she knows stuff well enough to make a good judgment.)
Large/complicated patches should still go by one of our maintainers, or team consensus.
We are all reasonable people, and nobody is working under employer pressure or needs an ego-boost badly, so in general we assume that no-one deliberately does anything stupid :-)
The directories involved are:
gcc/gcc/fortran/
gcc/gcc/testsuite/gfortran.dg/
gcc/gcc/testsuite/gfortran.fortran-torture/
gcc/libgfortran/
The manuals for release and current development versions of GNU Fortran can be downloaded from the wiki documentation page or the GCC online documents page.
Here is a short explanation on how to invoke and use the compiler once you have built it (or downloaded the binary).
We provide links to other information relevant to Fortran programmers; the GFortran wiki contains further links.
Copyright (C) Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
These pages are maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2014-06-29.