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I'm looking for a Fortran compiler. I've heard of gfortran and Intel Fortran. I've heard intel fortran is faster.

  • Must support Fortran 90
  • The more features of Fortran 95/2003/2008 supported the better.
  • Must support OpenMP
  • Must support MPI
  • Must support some form of BLAS
  • Should output good error messages. I'm just getting started with Fortran, so I'll be making a lot of mistakes.
  • It is important, that the compiler should produce efficient, highly-optimized executable assembly, particularly for matrix operations (so if it is tightly optimising for its favorite BLAS Library, that would be good).
  • The compiler could be free or commercial.

OS: Linux

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  • MPI is a library. It does not require compiler support.
    – Jeff Hammond
    Dec 2 '15 at 1:27
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There is also a non-free Fortran compiler by Intel.

According to wikipedia it fully supports Fortran 90/95, OpenMP and OpenMPI. There is an incomplete feature list of features from newer versions in the article as well, but I could not find an official compilation (only additional features between versions). BLAS is included in Intels Math Kernel Library, but can also be taken from GNU. I did not use the Fortran compiler, but for C and C++ compilers Intel's binaries were usually faster than GNU's. I cannot say anything about administration (it was preinstalled on the clusters).

Intel's compilers are quite expensive, so you would probably not want to buy it as a private person. You can however get it for free as long as you do not use it commercially.

The quality of error messages does not change a lot between different compilers, but it may be useful to be told about the same error by different compilers. You usually get an additional hint because it is phrased differently and the truth is somewhere in between.

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    Quite expensive? By what standards? They are not more expensive than the hardware whose value is increased by them.
    – Jeff Hammond
    Dec 2 '15 at 1:28
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GNU Fortran, GFortran, is Fortran 95 compliant with some support for 2003 & 2008, (Click on the links for status), is actively maintained and tested, has an active community for support, is available on most platforms and it is free.

What is not to like?

There are instructions on how to use GFortran with BLAS, LAPACK & LAPACK95, LAM/MPI, F90gl, netCDF, I/O API here!

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  • Does it support Fortran 90?
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Jun 6 '14 at 8:30
  • From the web link above "The GFortran compiler is fully compliant with the Fortran 95 Standard and includes legacy F77 support. In addition, a significant number of Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 features are implemented."
    – Steve Barnes
    Jun 6 '14 at 12:55

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