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[photran-dev] Status report
These are some bullet points on the status of Photran I sent to Beth Tibbitts for the PTP BOF at Supercomputing.


OK could you send me some bullet items, or slides if you have them, on the current status and plans for Photran?


Here are some bullet points for SC.  You will need to apply a "summarize and convert e-mail to PowerPoint" refactoring.

  • Current beta release:
    • Photran 4.0 beta 4 (CDT 5.0, Eclipse 3.4 - released August, 2008)
    • Many features stable from previous versions: editor/syntax highlighting, Outline view, gdb GUI, binary launcher, Fortran compiler error parsers, Open Declaration, Rename refactoring, Introduce Implicit None refactoring
    • New features in this beta (features added during 2008): content assist, Fortran Declaration view, Find All References; many internal improvements to the refactoring engine
  • Under active development:
    • Fortran 2003 support
    • Type checker and related refactorings (e.g., Extract Local Variable, Extract Subprogram)
    • Common Block refactorings
    • C preprocessor support

I asked some people for feature requests on the Photran mailing list a while ago, and that lead to the decision to implement Content Assist, the Declaration View, and Find All References.  These appeared to be some of the most critical missing features.

Supporting the C preprocessor also topped the list, but that will require a lot more work.  Luckily we have an excellent undergrad who will hopefully start on that this Spring.

Fortran 2003 support will definitely be in the next beta release since it's a requirement for Blue Waters.  Fortran 2008 support will follow.

We have another grad student working on refactorings for Common blocks (Common blocks are essentially a way to group lots of global variables together -- Fortran programmers use so many global variables they need a way to keep them all organized).   Actually, he is helping to add Fortran support in AMPI, but eliminating Common blocks is one step that is necessary to make that happen.

The plan is still for Photran to become a component of PTP.  We're in the middle of an IP review, which is unfortunately waiting on me at the moment; I would guess we'll move in early 2009.

I would encourage your users to download Photran and join the mailing list.  Beta 3 had 20,000 downloads, so there are definitely people out there using it.  (I don't know how to get the numbers for beta 4 since we're on an update site.)  Nevertheless, there's more it could do, and we would love to have more contributors/committers.  If any of them would benefit from a robust, Eclipse-based Fortran IDE, they should consider contributing to the project.

Jeff

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