> Al and Damian,
>
> Many thanks for the praise - every little bit helps:-)
>

>>> Over the last few years I have developed a 30,000 line Fortran-95
>>> engineering application using simultaneously several compilers (XLF,
>>> LF95, G95, and IVF).   During that time I toyed with Gfortran and put
>>> up with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back of each binary build.

>
> We are sharply aware of this problem.  It has come about largely
> because of the inadequacy, in the past, of our testsuite.  Not having
> a take-the-standard-and-write-a-testsuite yardstick to go by, ours has
> grown as we have fixed bugs and regressions.  Thus, our random walk
> through bugspace  is, at least Markovian; for the main part they do
> not get repeated.  Also, whilst some of the things that people try to
> do are "ïnteresting", the space in which we can wander seems to be
> bounded too.
>

>>> However, I'm now happy to report my "last" issue with it has been
>>> resolved and more importantly performance is almost identical to XLF
>>> and IVF in most cases.  Congratulations to all involved with this
>>> project!

>
> Thanks!
>
>
>

>> I'll second that.  I've used roughly half a dozen compilers over the
>> past five years.  Over the past year, gfortran really seems to be
>> raging ahead of a lot of the competition in features.  I really hope
>> the Gnu Compiler Collection will ultimately assume the leadership role
>> in the Fortran community that it played in the C++ community a decade
>> ago. It's great to see volunteers accomplishing what commercial
>> developers can't or won't accomplish in the same amount of time.

>
> I'm not entirely convinced that were are "raging ahead" but we are
> trying.  It has been difficult, at times, to get right the balance
> between new features, both non-standard and F200x, and ensuring that
> gfortran is an effective, standard-compliant F95 compiler.
> Astonishingly, in spite of the sometimes anarchic tendencies of the
> gfortran maintainers collective, we do seem to go in roughly the right
> direction.  For example, we have done the ground work for CLASSes and
> OOP during 2008, which should be realised in gcc-4.5.
>
> The constraints on commercial compiler developers are very different
> to those on a volunteer group.  In essence, they cannot afford the one
> step back for every two forward; therefore, they take one little step
> at a time:-)  I suspect that we will arrive at our respective
> destinations simultaneously....
>
> One feature of the gfortran maintainers group is that there is a
> fairly continuous turn-over, with a characteristic time of a few
> years.  Thus, we are always on the lookout for new blood.  If anybody
> out there is interested in joining in, please get in touch.
>
> Thanks again for the kind remarks.
>
> Paul