About Flang

Goals

Flang is a Fortran front-end designed for integration within LLVM, with open source licensing consistent with Clang C++ and LLVM, and suitable for deployment and interoperability with Clang/LLVM across a wide variety of systems.

The goals of Flang are:

• Ensure Flang becomes a self-sustaining open source project
• Attract additional developers from the (broad) community to create a critical mass of contributors
• Deliver single-core CPU performance comparable or better than that of gfortran
• Enable multicore CPU and GPU programming with a robust and performant implementation of OpenMP
• Create a source base that can be readily re-hosted and re-targeted to future systems as easily as Clang and LLVM
• Create a source base in which researchers and developers can ramp up and be productive quickly
• Create a source base that is componentized to a degree that enables re-use of elements of Flang in tools projects

History of Flang

The public GitHub repository for Flang was created May 11, 2017. In the first year, over 500 commits and 900 tests have been added to the repository.

CMake Version 3.10 added support for Flang.

Spack supports building and using Flang.

A Windows port has been initiated by the broader Flang community.

ARM Ltd. introduced a Fortran compiler for ARM/HPC based on Flang on November 13, 2017.