Upstreaming LLVM's Fortran "Flang" Front-End Has Been Flung Back Further

Upstreaming of LLVM's Fortran front-end developed as "f18" and being upstreamed with the Flang name was supposed to happen back in January. Three months later, the developers still are struggling to get the code into shape for integration.

During March they were attempting again to upstream the code and announced their plan date for merging it. That date came and went and announced they decided they weren't ready to merge this Fortran language front-end. "We have not managed to make all the necessary changes to F18 so we will not be merging today as previously communicated. Once all the work has been completed, we'll be back in touch with a date."

So for now the developers aren't sure when they will be ready to land the Flang front-end.

Once it is indeed upstreamed into the LLVM repository, we'll be around with some benchmarks of this promising LLVM Fortran implementation that was developed by NVIDIA and other organizations and newer than the former never-merged "flang" compiler from years ago.

Those wanting to experiment with the F18 Flang out-of-tree can find its code continue to advance via this GitHub repository.