https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-P ... guages.pdf // Julia did pretty well -- it remains to be seen whether the sufficient ecosystem development will follow.Regardless of performance, the issue is you often need more than pure numerics:- interoperability (e.g., Excel; and, in general, FFIs to work with APIs in other programming languages),- visualization (graphics, etc.),- input/output (in 21st century this involves networking libraries; db libs won't hurt, either).Even if you do solely "pure number crunching and hard core numeric simulation" eventually you want to share/communicate your results.It could be an Excel spreadsheet, perhaps an interactive website -- possibly adding a bunch of portable mobile applications later on. All of that is not (much of) a problem for C++ (which, incidentally, could definitely still benefit from further improvements in this area).However, AFAIK Fortran doesn't really do the whole "software ecosystem" thing -- and the remaining community doesn't appear to show any interest in changing this state of affairs.This affects popularity (and community size, networking effects, etc).This is important -- in programming you often need several programming languages ("the right for the right job").Interactive environments which excel (no pun intended) when prototyping the models / working with data -- like, say, R -- are at least as important as the "fast" compiled languages for numerics.And there's a reason there's an active and popular Rcpp package -- while RFortran hasn't seen an update since 2011.Even the traditional domain of Fortran in the past -- government projects / national labs -- has changed (and has been changing for a while now):- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE:
CERN:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_Program_Library- DOE:
http://www.energymanagertoday.com/doe-c ... 0105459/As for performance, think numerical linear algebra (quite common in applications): To my understanding BLAS and LAPACK are still considered the gold standard in the Fortran number-crunching community.Thing is, best commercial implementations of these (say, Intel MKL) are easily outperformed by free & open-source C++ code (which are also easier to use):-
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?ti ... LAPACK.3F- http://code.google.com/p/blaze-lib/wiki/BenchmarksTL;DR: If you have higher ease of use, popularity, performance (without having to pay extra for it), and interoperability -- what do you need Fortran for?