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The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ proposal (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Don't get me wrong. There is still a time and a place for Fortran. And this will also likely always be the case for C++. But I'm not sure it is entirely wise to choose it if you're creating a new project anymore.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm barely competent at programming. What is the use case for Fortran, besides maintaining ancient code?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    A lot of computational heavy tasks for science were done in Fortran at least ten years ago (and I think still are). I was told that's mainly because Fortran has a good deal of libraries for just that, and it was widely taught in academia so this is a common ground between the older and newer generations.

    I think it may be gradually superseded by Python, but I don't know if it is

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    A lot of the underlying libraries in python are actually written in Fortran (or were when they were conceived, and the Fortran components later replaced). Numpy, for example, was originally pretty much a wrapper on top of BLAS and LAPACK.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You might be right, but I have heard that song a lot of times, python, java, ml, pascal, obscure webdev.languages, AI will do it, typescript, etc etc etc

    I'd go with a better python than rust, you can put that "once in a lifetime asm optimized memsafe multi threaded code" in a package and just use it from python. But python has GIL and you can't just remove it so who knows what will be the next shiny thing? Probably several languages, like for easy peasy stuff up to hardcore multi threaded memory safe stuff. Gotta push us oldtimers out in some way, right :-) ?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    But python has GIL and you can't just remove it so

    https://docs.python.org/3/using/configure.html#cmdoption-disable-gil

    The GIL appears to be slowly going away.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    What I meant with that is if you remove the GIL, the people have to understand parallel access to data and a lot of orher quite complicated paradigms, which defeats, IMO, the whole idea of having a "simpler" language paired with a more versatile but more complex and complicated language, like C++.

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