Love seeing niche Show HN projects like this. The choice of Fortran is wild but that's what makes it fun. As someone building small Mac utilities, I appreciate any project that proves you don't need a massive stack to ship something useful.
It’s a fairly nice language. You can probably get better performance out of C/C++ with unlimited effort. But, it is really nice for allowing computational scientists to get, like, 95% of the way there.
I think it actually suffers from the reputation as this ancient/super hardcore performance language. The name comes from “Formula Translating System,” which implies… it was written for people who speak human languages first!
ive maintained a simulation software where the core is written in fortran. its using some intel math library that is expensive that i cannot recall, does immense calculations and makes faster binaries than c on every compiler we tried
Have you tried using the restrict keyword everywhere you can in c?
In Fortran, arrays are not allowed to overlap which allows some optimisations. c has rules in the spec about how memory accesses must occur, and overlapping arrays being possible prevents some compiler optimisations. The restrict keyword is you promising that the memory at some pointer won't be accessed through another pointer.
You can compare two implementations in Fortran/c using godbolt to see how each of them compile.
MKL is Intel’s famous numerical library (it includes things like BLAS “basic linear algebra subroutines” and fast Fourier transforms). It is availible for free, but IIRC they had some support plans maybe, maybe that’s what you are remembering?
It is closed source, but you can look at the source of the best open source competitor libflame/BLIS, and see that most of the performance comes from C and assembly.
It is difficult to beat “unlimited effort” C, but not many program really justify that treatment.
out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeling software.
We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon.
Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :)
When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc.
Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty.
Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab
It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.
I'd agree with all of those reasons! I do so myself as well, was just specifically curious about the "The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it" part. Don't get me wrong, I've spent too many nights learning "dead" languages too, but never with the idea that the world would be better if I published more code in these dead languages, it's just for my own gratification and learnings.
I came here to suggest COBOL as a better fit, then saw your comment a few levels up in this thread.
Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL?
(For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)
Which version of the language is it? It looks like you used Fortran90 at least (modules are used), which is pretty old, but not totally ancient like Fortran77.
Thank you for choosing Fortran. Seriously, I mean it.
Someone else already said this, but it is awesome because it proves that you can write useful software using languages others consider ancient or dead and therefore "unusable".
why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.
Yea na, Fortran is pretty compiler dependent and there are a lot of compilers. Already old Fortran code used all sorts of now-dead proprietary compilers and can take a huge effort to get it to compile on modern compilers or even modern computers. Modern code might use Gfortran which sometimes makes breaking changes so that's not an option. Perhaps if everyone uses the latest shiny new Flang or whatever, then it'll finally last 50 years? Not likely, given the history.
> your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language
Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users?
Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.
How do you plan on differentiating it from just a trivial setup of an FTP account that's mounted locally with curlftpfs and has files in a SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem?
Whenever I hear about this AT protocol I think about the text-based commands to control cellular modems. I can't be the only one, r-right guise... r-right?
From my experience building browser automation tools, the biggest challenge with most Chromium-based solutions is that their TLS fingerprint is a dead giveaway. Firefox-based approaches tend to fare much better against JA3/JA4 fingerprinting.
The key insight is moving fingerprint spoofing from the JS level (which is itself detectable) down to the native C++ level. It's a fundamentally different approach.
We got a spec for Assemblersky. Will be a weekend project. Cancel Easter :) And probably Midsummer too…
We got image composer and decoder plugged in in dev env, but will let this first open version breathe first. ASCII or early Apple algo
Fortran-fast feed builder probably in next open version. It crunches fast
Morning, 9 o’clock in Sweden, coffee and check-the-feed-on- Fortransky-time :)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/fortransky-we-in-153457794
https://github.com/FormerLab/fortransky
The repo is what’s this HN post links to, and I don’t see a link to the blog post in it or in other comments here. The blog post is interesting!
It’s a fairly nice language. You can probably get better performance out of C/C++ with unlimited effort. But, it is really nice for allowing computational scientists to get, like, 95% of the way there.
I think it actually suffers from the reputation as this ancient/super hardcore performance language. The name comes from “Formula Translating System,” which implies… it was written for people who speak human languages first!
In Fortran, arrays are not allowed to overlap which allows some optimisations. c has rules in the spec about how memory accesses must occur, and overlapping arrays being possible prevents some compiler optimisations. The restrict keyword is you promising that the memory at some pointer won't be accessed through another pointer.
You can compare two implementations in Fortran/c using godbolt to see how each of them compile.
MKL is Intel’s famous numerical library (it includes things like BLAS “basic linear algebra subroutines” and fast Fourier transforms). It is availible for free, but IIRC they had some support plans maybe, maybe that’s what you are remembering?
It is closed source, but you can look at the source of the best open source competitor libflame/BLIS, and see that most of the performance comes from C and assembly.
It is difficult to beat “unlimited effort” C, but not many program really justify that treatment.
Old school Fortran from before they added cleaner and more structured elements is terrifying.
We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :)
When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc.
Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty.
Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab
Can’t get enough Fortran
If you don't mind me asking, why is the world better with more Fortran-based software?
so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess
It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.
Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL?
(For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)
No CODASYL, the JSON parser is hand-rolled Fortran with a depth-tracking key scanner
CODASYL not a crazy direction for the feed composer
Got more depth to explore here, still early :)
Good you raised the topic, can write a blog post on it when we ship Cobolsky. Will be a proof of concept repo. Fortransky is the one
(If AT Proto did fixed-width records instead of JSON, COBOL would be formidable)
Anyway there are also 2018 and 2023 versions…
Someone else already said this, but it is awesome because it proves that you can write useful software using languages others consider ancient or dead and therefore "unusable".
Keep up the great work!
why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.
Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users?
Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.
Fortransky benchmarks pending
the feed scorer will have real numbers worth reporting
Whenever time allows in future: Fortran vs Go vs Python
You hit l+ENTER to like a post. If anyone replies from Bluesky, we hit n+ENTER and see the notifs. And so on
Fortransky is 70% Fortran, rest is Rust, C and a tiny Python helper
One of the guys wrote 8xxROM some 10 years later.
Today known as U−Boot :)
Also a great blogging platform: https://leaflet.pub
Here's a goal tracker: https://goals.garden
This one just dropped recently; it's 44 different atproto-related apps with a cyberpunk theme: https://www.aetheros.computer/
Lots others mentioned here: https://blueskydirectory.com/
Many devs reuse schema and write some twitter/bsky clone
Kind of search engine for my Blueaky likes
Gotta get off the timeline, germ has a messaging app, then there is Tangled and some more
We do Fortransky and Cobolsky now, got more ideas for the protocol than time :)
that's all I'm aware of
(edit) Oops, just saw that you mentioned it, confused by your first line then. Tangled is awesome!
Tangential, but to the author, are there any FORTRAN codebases you feel are well designed?
The original Manual exists as a PDF. Was it in a Stuttgart uni URL? Just a search away.
Late in Sweden, gotta Fortran tomorrow. Happy to continue discussion here tomorrow.
Interesting choice. Why?
It’s fun and it is appreciated by them, and the young ones who are curious
- VCs band together to fund something shiny.
- Devs love shiny, helping spread the something.
- VCs enschitify it to get their coins back.
The key insight is moving fingerprint spoofing from the JS level (which is itself detectable) down to the native C++ level. It's a fundamentally different approach.