Need XL Fortran for Mac OS X

By xorlworld at Thu, Mar 20 2008 6:18pm |

Scientific Programming

I tried my best to search the product but can't find one on stock. They say it's heavily backordered.
Since it's old software seems like they don't sell it anymore.

As my best knowledge, IBM distributed xlf beta and also trial/demo version for free.

If you have this software and don't use it anymore I'll gladly buy or trade it.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Thu, 2008-04-03 04:51 — drewmccormack

XLF RIP

I'm afraid IBM has stopped supporting XLF on the Mac. It only works on PPC machines anyway. I used it until Leopard was released, but it stopped working on 10.5 and I moved to gfortran for PPC development.

I recommend you do the same. Trying to get XLF working will waste a lot of your time, and ultimately is a very short term solution.

Drew

---------------------------
Drew McCormack
http://www.maccoremac.com
http://www.macanics.net
http://www.macresearch.org

Tue, 2008-06-17 05:27 — sergecohen

XLF vs Gfortran comparison

Hello Drew;

I'm just facing the XLF on 10.5 problems ... also tried to use ld_classic (or more precisely I had xlf to use ld_classic for its linking stage), to no avail.

Now, I can for sure switch to gfortran, but I'm wondering what is the performance level of the produced code in term of speed : The code I'm working on used to be 2 to 4 times slower when compiled by g77 than by xlf. I know that gfortran is a complete different beast than g77, so I am wondering what should I expect from gfortran compiled code (when compared to xlf).

Thanks for sharing any info on that.

Serge.

Tue, 2008-06-17 07:44 — drewmccormack

GFortran code performance

Actually, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I was resigned to taking a performance hit when I moved from XLF to gfortran, but gfortran was very competitive for the code I am developing (http://www.scm.com). I found it sometimes produced code a bit slower (10-20%), and sometimes faster (10-20%). I had expected to see a 50% performance hit, at least.

gfortran uses the latest gcc backend (4.2), which has considerable performance improvements. So don't let performance stop you. If anything, it is stability that hampers gfortran most. (By that I mean that you often encounter new bugs whenever you upgrade the compiler -- things that used to work stop working.)

Drew

---------------------------
Drew McCormack
http://www.maccoremac.com
http://www.macanics.net
http://www.macresearch.org

Wed, 2008-07-30 11:01 — Wood Lotz