Re:Why physicists still use Fortran
by ricree on Sunday December 18, 2016 @03:46PM
(#13207540)
For Python, at least, the most popular numeric computation library (NumPy) uses a fair bit of Fortran under the hood. I'm not certain whether the matrix operations do, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
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Doesn't NumPy just use BLAS and LAPACK for matrix operations?
Re:Why physicists still use Fortran
by ThatGeoGuy on Sunday December 18, 2016 @06:17PM
(#13208308)
The vast majority of BLAS and LAPACK are written in Fortran (at least, the ones provided by netlib.org). Github also reports that OpenBLAS is around 50% Fortran, so there's quite a bit there too [1]. Usually when you call BLAS functions from C you're really calling a cBLAS wrapper to some Fortran function. This is generally why you see -lgfortran -lf77blas when you compile programs that require numerical tools.
At least in OpenBLAS, most (all?) of the BLAS routines are C functions that call kernels written in assembly, but many of the LAPACK routines are the Netlib reference Fortran versions.