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Minisymposium Presentation
Type-Safe Generic Programming in Fortran
Presenter
Dr. Clune is a senior computational scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He leads the software infrastructure team for the GEOS Earth system model. He also serves on the Fortran language committee where he leads the subgroup focused on introducing generic programming features into the Fortran language. Dr. Clune has developed a number of open-source packages in support of advanced usage of Fortran including: pFUnit, a parallel unit testing framework, gFTL, a templating system for containers, and pFlogger, a parallel logging framework.
Description
When the Fortran language committee first collected requests for new language features for what has now become the Fortran 2023 standard, support for generic programming emerged as a top priority. However, due to the anticipated complexity, a dedicated committee subgroup was formed, and implementation of generic programming was purposely spread across two language release cycles -- aiming for what is internally referred to as F202Y. In this talk, I will begin with a brief overview of existing Fortran features that support generic programming and then proceed to a detailed examination of the plans for F202Y. This discussion will include motivating use cases, type-safe design goals, (probable) syntax, and a few simple examples. I conclude with a disussion on the likely limitations of generic programming in F202Y and my expectations for extended capabilities in the subsequent release, F203X.