Dear list,
[CC'ed to debian-science since I imagine that's where most of the
FORTRAN users are. Please follow up to -devel.]
With the latest g++ ABI transition soon to be finished, I have to ask
whether a similar transition is planned for g77 to gfortran. It appears
that the ABI of code generated with the two compilers is different.
Both compilers have a -ff2c / -fno-f2c option pair controlling whether
the code is ABI-compatible to that generated by f2c. But in g77, the
default is -ff2c, while it is the opposite for gfortran.
>From the info manual for gfortran:
_Caution:_ It is not a good idea to mix Fortran code compiled with
`-ff2c' with code compiled with the default `-fno-f2c' calling
conventions as, calling `COMPLEX' or default `REAL' functions
between program parts which were compiled with different calling
conventions will break at execution time.
_Caution:_ This will break code which passes intrinsic functions
of type default `REAL' or `COMPLEX' as actual arguments, as the
library implementations use the `-fno-f2c' calling conventions.
Gfortran claims not to be completely ready for use as a g77 replacement
yet (and someone who has attempted to compile Cernlib with it reports a
large number of problems yet). But eventually that day will come... we
should have some transition plan in mind by then.
In addition, (speaking as Cernlib Debian maintainer) I have a specific
question about g77 in Debian. There are two g77 bugs that can cause
significant problems in mixed FORTRAN/C applications on AMD64 machines:
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15397
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17541
Could someone tell me whether it is likely that both will eventually be
fixed in the g77-3.4 available in Debian? If so, in what timeframe?
The latter is fixed upstream, but the former is apparently unfixed. It
can apparently be worked around with the -fno-f2c flag. But this (from
the first half of my email) will be incompatible with any current
FORTRAN libraries in Debian.
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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