Published: Jun 9, 2025 by Liam Pattinson
Project info
RSECon24 featured a satellite event called Back to the Fortran Future which brought together a number of Fortran developers to discuss the challenges facing the community and plan some actionable solutions. The same few problems were raised repeatedly:
- A lack of widely-agreed-upon community standards for Fortran best practices.
- Relatively few quality training courses.
- Immature or missing developer tooling compared to languages such as Python.
The last of those points was a definite pain point for me when I first started writing Fortran. After some research, I was able to set up most of a modern tool stack – a CMake build system, fprettify for formatting, and pFUnit for testing – but with the exception of CMake, the tools I found were hard to set up and lacking in features compared to their equivalents in languages like C++ or Python.
After the satellite meeting, I contacted the organisers to see if I could organise a follow-up hacakthon event to work on tooling. I already had some experience in this domain from my work on Fortitude (something I’ll definitely write up for this blog eventually!), and it was clear to me that the community was eager to see some improvements.
The organisers of Back to the Fortran Future very helpfully provided me with with some event planning advice and put me in contact with other interested people in the community. I sent around a short survey to collect community feedback on what sort of event they would like to see, and received a very positive response. Following the results of the survey, I started planning to run an in-person event, but unfortunately wasn’t able to secure the necessary funding, so I instead opted to run an online-only event. In addition, rather than running a traditional 1-2 day hackthon, I chose to run a longer-duration but lower-commitment ‘hack week’ in which the attendees were free to dedicate as much or as little time as they wanted to their hack week projects and could fit their contributions around their regularly scheduled work activities.
The event took place between Tuesday 27th and Friday 30th May 2025, and featured contributions from 9 attendees:
- Made advances towards implementing a formatting mode for Fortitude. Some issues in its Topiary grammar were fixed, and steps were taken to reuse code style linting rules for more advanced formatting operations.
- Added four new linting rules to Fortitude, and progress was made towards a further two.
- Corrected a number of longstanding errors in tree-sitter-fortran.
- Investigated the possibility of adding FPM support to pFUnit.
- Worked towards a user-sortable reference of which features are offered by various compilers and tools.
- Resolved licensing issues that were preventing the inclusion of the FORD documentation generator in Fortran-Lang community projects.
Though the attendance of the event was lower than I was hoping for, those who stuck through to the end showed great commitment, and we made some good progress. It was great to see people getting to grips with how developer tools work, and some even learned new programming languages. Running the event was more of a challenge than I’d expected, and I was effectively on-call for the whole duration. In addition, while the ‘hack week’ format made the event more accessible for some, the feedback collected afterwards suggested that a shorter but more focused conventional format might have been more productive, as it was difficult for some to schedule and prioritise their hackathon contributions around their regular work.
Overall, this was an interesting event to run, and I’m looking forward to applying what I learned to future events.