Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Do we have to build gcc with fortran now?

[Michael Schreckenbauer]

Am Freitag, 24. Juni 2011, 15:00:32 schrieb Dale:
> Michael Schreckenbauer wrote:
> > Am Freitag, 24. Juni 2011, 08:04:43 schrieb Nikos Chantziaras:
> >> On 06/24/2011 01:16 AM, Dale wrote:
> >>> If it works with fortran turned on, I'd leave it alone. With
> >>> hindsight,
> >>> I should have left well enough alone anyway. It wasn't hurting a
> >>> thing.
> >>> Watch the elog messages. It will tell you at some point to either
> >>> enable fortran or emerge some other package that I forget the name
> >>> of. That one package pulled several dependencies on my rig. YMMV.
> >>
> >> Well, as I said in another post, I do have -fortan in my make.conf and
> >> there are no problems.  I do not have programs installed that need a
> >> fortran compiler.  And I do not have kde-meta installed; that's a
> >> waste
> >> of resources.  I only install what I actually need.
> >
> > You have no programs, that *need* fortran, but it could well be, that
> > you have programs installed, that perform better when compiled with a
> > fortran compiler. I think of sci-libs/fftw here as an example. It's
> > used by programs like blender, imagemagick and maybe some others. The
> > developers of said library use fortran, because they benchmarked it. If
> > you disable fortran, you use the slower C fallback solution. If you
> > disable fftw in those packages, you get a slower implementation too
> > afaik.
> > After all, gentoo is a source based distribution. We all already have a
> > couple of languages installed. There's a C compiler a standard user
> > will never use. There's a C++ compiler only used by programmers. We all
> > have them, only to compile programs, that need them.
> > Why not enable fortran, even if it's only optional, to get the best of
> > the available implementations? In the end it's only one programming
> > language more installed on your system.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Michael
>
> I just wonder if that is why Cantor was set up to use fortran by
> default.  Not because it is smaller, requires a few less package but
> that it is what it is designed to run off of.  It may well work with
> something else but not as fast, not as good or something else we don't
> know about.

cantor uses R as default backend. R uses fortran. And yes, that's because of 
its speed, when it comes to mathematics and numerics.

> Just makes me think again on this one.
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)

Michael