SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite for more Fortran code

Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by adastra22 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @10:44AM (#35988709)

This is crazy. Get over yourself! Whether you like it or not, Fortran is still THE industry standard for scientific codes, and the fastest compiled language on many architectures.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by raoulj on Thursday May 18, 2023 @11:43AM (#35989615)

In the defense of the SciPy response, while there may be some programming language zealotry behind the position, it seems to be from a lack of expertise in SciPy to maintain its Fortran code that's pushing SciPy to avoid new Fortran additions. Hopefully OP gets PRIMA through! Been admiring this effort, Dr. Zhang.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by ok123456 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @12:40PM (#35990540)

F2py, which is already a standard part of numpy, does the heaving lifting and generates idiomatic python wrappers for Fortan code.

It's just zealotry of them going "eeew fortran that's like really really old". Fortran got multidimensional dense numeric arrays right. Modern Fortran allows you to do elemental/vectorized operations on them. C does not even come close, and requires tons of preprocessor macros if you try. Every other 'modern' language introduces a bunch of tooling and dependencies just to get where Fortran is, because they just don't have a focus on scientific computing.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by michaelt on Thursday May 18, 2023 @12:59PM (#35990873)

> It's just zealotry of them going "eeew fortran that's like really really old".

The developers of SciPy are maintaining a codebase that is 18% fortran, according to [1]. The only language that makes up a larger part of the codebase is python.

Don't you think it's possible their opinion on fortran is actually informed by quite a bit of experience?

[1] https://github.com/scipy/scipy/

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by bouchard on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:12PM (#35991078)

I don't believe anybody would argue against their reluctance for old FORTRAN 77 code; it's a PITA to deal with.

The central issue is that their experience with the old Fortran doesn't translate to modern Fortran; they are two different beasts.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by ok123456 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:41PM (#35991489)

Buy a copy of plusfort.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by zaikunzhang on Thursday May 18, 2023 @03:04PM (#35992592)

> The central issue is that their experience with the old Fortran doesn't translate to modern Fortran; they are two different beasts.

This is so true! I hope anyone could spend a few minutes checking what modern Fortran is before blaming it. A good reference is https://fortran-lang.org/en/

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by zaikunzhang on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:13PM (#35991910)

I guess one of the major issues is the compilation and packaging of the Fortran code. It is also my experience when developing PDFO ( https://www.pdfo.net/ ), the predecessor of PRIMA.

This is also reflected by the following comment at https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118#issuecomment-155...

> The real maintenance burden is the compilation and the packaging not the code itself that we are carrying around.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by zaikunzhang on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:16PM (#35991942)

Thank you so much for your encouragement! Such positive feedback means a lot to me.

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by cozzyd on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:25PM (#35992074)

As long as PRIMA is maintained (which seems likely independently), it's only the bindings that need to be maintained. And it's trivial to write a Fortran interface in C or C++ (perhaps that can be included in PRIMA anyway) and then SciPy can pretend like it's not Fortran...

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Re:SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite ... by asdfman123 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:45PM (#35992351)

Are you saying they're acting like PRIMA-donnas?

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