David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> writes: > It was brought to my attention that there was an old PR from 2009 > suggesting adding fortran back to base (by including the gcc fortran > frontend) because otherwise various messy things happened with pkgsrc > packages using fortran. > > Those particular pkgsrc issues no longer apply, but others do, and > there's been some talk about that lately -- the default in pkgsrc is > g95, but g95 is old, dead upstream, and not without issues; the > alternative is building a pkgsrc gcc with fortran but this, in > addition to being a general pain, potentially leads to problems with > the pkgsrc gcc and base gcc not being quite compatible. > > Meanwhile, much as we'd like to pretend fortran is dead, it's not and > that's not going to change in the foreseeable future. It's certainly > reasonable to include a fortran compiler in base, as well as > historically accepted. I don't know if we ought to or not, but I think > it's worth noting the pros and cons. I agree that fortran is very much not dead. My guess is that enabling gfortran in our in-tree gcc builds will be only a fairly small bit of size and build time, and it's in the comp set that people on embedded systems will exclude anyway. Arguably it could be a MK variable, defaulting to yes, which also makes it easier to avoid. All in all, I think it would be good to have fortran in base because of the combination of it being reliable historical useful coming as part of a package we already have in base I also wonder if clang does fortran in a reasonable and satisfying way; a quick web search turns up 'dragonegg' which is a hybrid gcc/clang system that is not quite maintained and has some issues.
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