Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Do we have to build gcc with fortran now?

[David W Noon <dwnoon@ntlworld.com>]

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On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:18:23 +0200, Michael Schreckenbauer wrote about
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Do we have to build gcc with fortran now?:

> Am Freitag, 24. Juni 2011, 08:04:43 schrieb Nikos Chantziaras:
> > On 06/24/2011 01:16 AM, Dale wrote:
> > > If it works with fortran turned on, I'd leave it alone. With
> > > hindsight, I should have left well enough alone anyway. It wasn't
> > > hurting a thing. Watch the elog messages. It will tell you at
> > > some point to either enable fortran or emerge some other package
> > > that I forget the name of. That one package pulled several
> > > dependencies on my rig. YMMV.
> > 
> > Well, as I said in another post, I do have -fortan in my make.conf
> > and there are no problems.  I do not have programs installed that
> > need a fortran compiler.  And I do not have kde-meta installed;
> > that's a waste of resources.  I only install what I actually need.
> 
> You have no programs, that *need* fortran, but it could well be, that
> you have programs installed, that perform better when compiled with a
> fortran compiler. I think of sci-libs/fftw here as an example. It's
> used by programs like blender, imagemagick and maybe some others. The
> developers of said library use fortran, because they benchmarked it.
> If you disable fortran, you use the slower C fallback solution. If
> you disable fftw in those packages, you get a slower implementation
> too afaik.

Just to add some further prophecy to this: with GCC 4.6 the gfortran
compiler became a complete implementation of Fortran 2003.  This allows
for Object Oriented Programming (OOP), the fashionable style of
designing code these days.  This means that there could well be more
new software written in Fortran; without a Fortran compiler a user will
be unable to install this code on a source-based distro like Gentoo.

> After all, gentoo is a source based distribution. We all
> already have a couple of languages installed. There's a C compiler a
> standard user will never use. There's a C++ compiler only used by
> programmers. We all have them, only to compile programs, that need
> them. Why not enable fortran, even if it's only optional, to get the
> best of the available implementations? In the end it's only one
> programming language more installed on your system.

Indeed, the ability to compile as many languages as possible is almost
a necessity for users of a source-based system like Gentoo.
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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