Re:How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran
by kdelok on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @01:11PM
(#14498928)
In general the performance of C vs Fortran is a moot point. However, for numerical performance, Fortran has (at least) two major advantages that I can see, both of which are about usability:
- In-built support for multi-dimensional arrays and operations on arrays. This makes it so much easier to work with numerical datasets than in C.
- BLAS and LAPACK are the two foremost packages used for linear algebra. They're written in Fortran, so it's just a bit easier to use them, rather than their C APIs. I've had unpleasant experiences debugging things across the boundary between C and Fortran.
- In-built support for multi-dimensional arrays and operations on arrays. This makes it so much easier to work with numerical datasets than in C.
- BLAS and LAPACK are the two foremost packages used for linear algebra. They're written in Fortran, so it's just a bit easier to use them, rather than their C APIs. I've had unpleasant experiences debugging things across the boundary between C and Fortran.