I'm trying to decide between Fortran and C++ for an application in scientific computing. It's not clear to me if Fortran still has advantages over other languages when it comes to performance. For example, I believe since Fortran enforces strict aliasing, better optimizations could be made by the compiler when compared to C before C99. I'm unsure of how C++ fits in here.
Any guidance?
The other major issue is the learning curve which is very huge for C++ and exceptionally small for Fortran (90 and later). Fortran is like MATLAB with operations like ...
matmul( matmul(transpose(B), D), B )norm2(x)call gesvd(A,S,u,vt)Fortran also has pointers, dynamic memory, user defined data types etc.
It is well supported by major vendors (Intel/Sun/IBM/Cray/PGI/NAG etc.), open source (gfortan/g95) communities and developers of numerical library/APIs such as PETSc, MPI etc.
Heck the new standard (Fortran 2008) even has co-arrays for doing parallel programming without the need for MPI/OpenMP and some Fortran compilers already support it (g95 and Cray).
Basically it has all the good qualities required for numerical computing, is easier than MATLAB, is standardized, free, scalable (with MPI/OpenMP and co-arrays), produces blazing fast/parallel code.
For numerics nothing beats Fortran but unfortunately for anything else everything beats Fortan. So if you are a scientist with a safe job and only do numerical/HPC computing then stick with Fortran otherwise learn and use C++ as it is widely used for non numerical software.