Why physicists still use Fortran

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran by luthaf on Sunday December 18, 2016 @08:17PM (#13208793)

> I don't know the particular multidimensional array discussion you experienced, but evolving a language takes slow time, and meanwhile people experiment with what is possible out-of-tree, like with the ndarray library, which seems to be well respected.

A Fortran-like multidimensional library could effectively happen out of tree, but ndarray is closer to Python's numpy.ndarray than to Fortran arrays. And this means that ndarray can not support negative indexing (see here: https://github.com/bluss/rust-ndarray/issues/152). I started a prototype of Fortran like array here: https://github.com/Luthaf/mudi, if anyone want to look at the code or even work on this.

My only problem at the time was that `Index` must always return a reference, and cannot return a new struct. From my understanding, this could be solved with the HKT/ATC work.

> Right now there is a focus on SIMD in Rust, which is crucial for this domain, so there is progress being made.

This is very exciting! And knowing the Rust community, we may even get a cross-platform cross-architecture SIMD library with a nice API!

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran by steveklabnik on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:50PM (#13209551)

The SIMD stuff is extremely complex. The focus for now seems to be to _not_ work on a nice API, and tackle the problems with just getting the absolute basics done in an acceptable way. Higher level stuff will come later.

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