Hello Philip + Dimitrios
Thanks for your posts. I am another GSOC student. I am working on the
Fortran front-end of GCC (gfortran). Like most GFortran developers, my
background is more in the natural sciences (astrophysics in my case)
rather than computer science.
My project is to help add coarray support for GFortran. Coarrays are a
cool new feature in the Fortran 2008 standard that give Fortran native
support for parallel programming (as opposed to using MPI or OpenMP).
Scientific simulations (especially in parallel clusters) are the bread
and butter of Fortran.
Learning how GCC works has been difficult but rewarding. My work is
split between the libgfortran library, which is straight forward enough,
and the Fortran front-end, which at first looked like gobbledygook.
Today I can actually understand most front-end functions when I read
them, but it took a long time to get to this point. GCC has a scary
learning curve.
The libgfortran library is more forgiving for the beginner. We are using
MPI as the backend to implement coarrays and I have very much enjoyed
learning MPI.
So far my contributions have been modest, but now that I've crossed much
of the learning curve, I feel optimistic. To an extent the progress has
to be a bit slow because we are looking at the new Fortran standard and
thinking about the best way to add features.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.
