Fortran Compiler Windows 10
Nguyet Mahrenholz
GFortran is the name of the GNU Fortran project. The main wiki page offers many helpful links about GFortran, as well as Fortran in general. In this guide, the installation process for GFortran on Windows, Linux, macOS and OpenBSD is presented in a beginner-friendly format based on the information from GFortranBinaries.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): An official compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables on Windows. With Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI one can run text editors and other graphical programs.
Finally, you can switch between different versions or set the default one with the update-alternatives (see manpage). There are many online tutorials on how to use this feature. A well structured one using as an example C and C++ can be found here, you can apply the same logic by replacing either gcc or g++ with gfortran.
OpenCoarrays is an open-source software project that produces an application binary interface (ABI) used by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Fortran front-end to build executable programs that leverage the parallel programming features of Fortran 2018. Since OpenCoarrays is not a separate compiler, we include it here, under gfortran.
While with gfortran you can compile perfectly valid code using coarrays, the generated binaries will only run in a single image (image is a Fortran term for a parallel process), that is, in serial mode. OpenCoarrays allows running code in parallel on shared- and distributed-memory machines, similar to MPI:
Conda-forge has GFortran/MinGW, I think it is based on an early attempt to distribute MSYS2 via conda. What you get is GCC 5.3.0 and can be somewhat shaky depending on the features you want to use in modern Fortran.
Nobody decided to do it yet, simple as that. It is not a nice task, you will have to patch the compiler until it passes its test suite, than you have to rebuild all existing packages using this compiler (only in case of an ABI change), if something fails probably patch the package build and/or the compiler build.
Another choice may be using Docker. You can install and configure whatever you want in the Docker image. People just need to load that image and bingo.
Or, I think you can also create a WSL image with GUI configured, and people can load that WSL image, and visit it using Windows Remote Desktop via the port you defined in that image (such as port 3389, 3390, etc).
But of course, in the above two cases, users are still using Linux actually. But Gfortran performs the best in Linux.
If you make the students use Visual Studio Code it should be able to integrate natively with the WSL environment, no virtualization from within WSL. BTW The same is true for docker images, although you might need the remote extension pack from Microsoft
I always recommend MSYS2 (winget install msys2.msys2), because in addition to the GCC suite, we may also need other tools, such as lapack/openblas, hdf5, git, python, etc., which can be easily obtained in MSYS2. After installing MSYS2, we only need to set the the environment path of the execution program can be: C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin, that you can access the MSYS2 environment in cmd and pwsh.
Other than that, Cygwin (winget install Cygwin.Cygwin) is also possible, but as far as I know, MSYS2 seems to be based on Cygwin under the hood, so I think there may be no essential difference between MSYS2 and Cygwin, but MSYS2 is more convenient.
Cygwin has a much more complete *nix environment easily available with hundreds (thousands?) of additional packages and X11 Windows; but with the other options available and depending on whether you also do/do not want them to have a Unix-like interface and X11 windows it might not be what you want. I adore it, but there are a lot of other options, as mentioned. Works great with fpm(1) too, but so do some of the others.
The rebuilding after such an update is mostly automated, the problem are the 5% of packages which might fail, those can be mostly fixed in the respective package recipe. Since we are talking about 17k packages on conda-forge and an update affecting the fraction which uses GCC for C, C++ and/or GFortran and Windows, it is best to coordinate such effort with the conda-forge core team.
Conda environments provide enough isolation to make this work. You can have completely different and conflicting runtimes for some programs if you have them in different environments, then you can just stack them on top of each other and things should usually work. Cross-linking or cross-loading libraries between such environments will be a bit more tricky as you try to break the environment isolation.
At GFortran - GCC Wiki several options to download gfortran binaries are discussed. I have not tested these downloads (on Windows I use MSYS2). Note that for these solutions OpenCoarrays usually is not included, so the use of Coarrys may be be limited to a single image.
There is also a separate distribution of mingw-w64 that can be installed without MSYS2, but I don't recommend it, as the last files there have gcc-8.1.0, from 2018 (apart from a recent build by Ray Linn that includes the Ada, but not the Fortran compiler).
Another compiler that is now free is Intel Fortran : you have to install Microsoft Visual Studio Community, Intel oneAPI Base Toolkit and Intel oneAPI HPC Toolkit. More information here. Available on Linux, macOS and Windows (of course, Visual Studio is needed only on Windows). Intel oneAPI is at least partly open source, not sure about the Fortran compiler.
MSYS2 is a much smaller package (in terms of disk pace needed), and is used by several other free projects: R (Rtools), Octave and Strawberry Perl all include parts of it, including the gcc compilers.
To compile Fortran code for Windows you need a Fortran compiler for Windows. Microsoft neither provides a built-in one nor offers one for sale. Third-party compilers are available, including gfortran, but you'll need to install one yourself. If you want to use gfortran in particular, or if you like it simply because you don't have to spend money to get it, then I would recommend obtaining it as part of mingw-w64. Alternatives are available from multiple vendors, some free of charge, but most for sale.
Fortran is one of the earliest imperative computer programming languages around. It is often used for scientificand numeric programs. This page lists free Fortran compilers for various operating systems. Note that the differentsoftware listed are compliant with different Fortran standards, eg, ANSI Fortran 77, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003,Fortran 2008, Fortran 2018, and so on, so be sure to get the appropriate one for your purpose. Some of them may alsocome complete with debuggers,editors and anintegrated development environment (IDE).
The MinGW-w64 project provides the libraries, headers and runtime needed for the GNU compilers, among whichis their Fortran compiler, to run on a Windows system. They allow you to create both32 bit and 64 bit programs with the compilers. The project also provides cross compilers, so that you cancompile (say) a Windows program from a Linux system if you choose. Precompiled binaries can be obtained froma variety of sources, includingthe official MinGW-w64 binaries site,and third-party sites such as the MSYS2 project.
Flang is the Fortran compiler front end of the LLVM project (which also includes other compilers, suchas a C/C++ compiler).The current version (as at the date this was written) implements Fortran 2003 (with some features fromFortran 2008), while the next version (currently foundhere) implements Fortran 2018.The link above leads to the source code for the compiler. Thedownloadable binaries (ie, executables)can be found here. Note that the binaries are for Linux (both x86-64 and OpenPOWER) only, although work ona Windows port has begun.
Silverfrost FTN95 is a Fortran 95 compiler that supports Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and Fortran 95. The compiler generates32-bit and 64-bit exectuables for Windows and the Microsoft .NET framework. It comes with CHECKMATE,a tool that lets programmers check the correctness of their code at runtime. Also included is Plato 3 (an IDE),full source level debugging, documentation and examples. You may only generate code for your personal use on yourhome computer, and all executables will display a banner on execution.
The Oracle Developer Studio includes C, C++ and Fortran compilers for Linux (specifically the Red Hat and Oracledistributions) andSolaris. Based on information displayed on the download page at the date this entry was written, it looks like you canfreely use the compiler for developing commercial applications if you wish. (As with all software, you should of courseverify this yourself, since the situation sometimes changes over time.)
gfortran, part of the GNU Compiler Collection, is a free Fortran 95/2003/2008 compiler. Like all things from GNU,it comes primarily in source code form. Precompiled binaries (executables) are available for Windows from third-partysites (such as those listed on this page), and if you run Linux, you can probably just get it from your distribution'srepositories.
This is a well-known Fortran to C converter that comes with source code. The site alsoincludes pre-compiled binaries (executables) for MSDOS and Microsoft Windows, althoughthese are by no means the only systems supported; the compiler works on Unix systems likeBSD, Linux, etc, though you have to compile it yourself on those systems.Libraries containing the runtime support needed (together with the C source code)are also included. You need a C compiler to generatebinaries from your Fortran sources.
[Update: this website appears to be gone. For the record, it was previously located atwww.g95.org.]G95 is an open source Fortran 95 compiler. At the time this was written, most of the ISO Fortran 95 standardhas been implemented. Platforms supported include Linux(x86, Intel IA64, AMD x86_64), Windows, Macintosh OS X, FreeBSD,Sparc Solaris and HP-UX.