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Re: [mpi-21] F90 bindings


I think the more critical issue is what people actually use (and plan to use) out there. I don't quite know about the developments in the Fortran space in general. But, in the open source world, we were just able to get a decent F90 compiler out recently.

Are there any decent F03 (open source or not) compilers out there? Are there people who use F03 over F90? I remember the MM5 folk are using F77/F90. The rest of the tools we use are written in C.

Quoting Purushotham Bangalore <puri@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

Jeff raises an important issue here. In it's current form are the F90 bindings really useful? Should we just move on to the next version of Fortran (2003 or 2008) and deprecate the F90 bindings? Anyone received any feedback on this issue from F90 users?

Puri
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Squyres" <jsquyres@xxxxxxxxx>
To: mpi-21@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2007 7:23:57 AM (GMT-0600) America/Chicago
Subject: [mpi-21] F90 bindings

The F90 bindings specified in MPI-2 currently require nearly 7 million
interface functions in the Fortran 90 module (!).  This large number
of interfaces is required because F90 is a strongly-typed language and
has no analogue of (void*).  MPI_SEND, for example, has to be
overloaded with function signatures for every possible type of choice
buffer.  Worse, many collectives have *2* choice buffers... the end
result is that nearly 7M interfaces are needed.  As result, many MPI
implementations implement only a fraction of the MPI F90 module
interface functions.

Additionally, user-defined F90 types cannot be supported.

This is clearly a [big] bug in the F90 bindings.  What does the Forum
want to do about this for MPI-2.1?  Perhaps add some clarification
language?  Or ...?

Can this issue be added to the discussion list for the bindings
subcommittee?

--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems






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