[LLVMdev] GSoC project questions.

Bill Wendling
2013-04-16T07:22:07Z

On Apr 12, 2013, at 7:20 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Anton Korobeynikov" <anton at korobeynikov.info>
>> To: "Matthieu Brucher" <matthieu.brucher at gmail.com>
>> Cc: "Bill Wendling" <isanbard at gmail.com>, "LLVM
Developers Mailing List" <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
>> Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 9:04:22 AM
>> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] GSoC project questions.
>>
>>> Indeed, dragonegg supports Fortran, but through a gfortran bridge.
>>> The
>>> really interesting part in Fortran is in fact arrays!
>>>
>>> Anyway, it's just my opinion, I'm a simple user ;)
>> Fortran has its own standard library and it's damn big. Also, the
>> Fortran grammar is not the simplest (or, rather - straightforward
>> one). So this certainly looks too big for GSoC.
>>
>> Though, it might be a good start for someone.
>>
>> I believe Bill (CCed) started something few years ago. So, maybe he
>> can share his thoughts on this project.
>
> FWIW, I also started working on a Fortran frontend (derived from Clang, but
mostly just to piggyback on the Driver and CPP infrastructure).
> https://github.com/hfinkel/lfort
>
> If you're interested in contributing, that would be great.
Nevertheless, I think that Anton is right. Creating a quality Fortran compiler
is a community effort, and seems too big for a GSoC project. Perhaps we could
identify some separately-useful component.
>
For what it's worth, I concur. It is a massive undertaking to support a full
language. The flang code is here:

	https://github.com/isanbard/flang

I haven't had time to work on it recently. And there are many things that
I'd like to fix in there. It might be good to look at lfort and flang and
see what can be shared between the two. :)

-bw