LFortran Compiles Fpm

Fortran’s comeback tour just added a new stop: LFortran now compiles fpm, the Fortran Package Manager, and the team bumped their progress bar to 9/10 toward beta. They admit they “cheated” by saving a big step (LAPACK) for later, which instantly sparked progress‑bar conspiracy jokes. Still, the vibe is “we fixed a ton of bugs, it runs the tests, let’s party.”

Then the comment section lit up. One camp is fighting over language culture—wrs called out the HPC crowd’s habit of saying “codes” instead of “code,” spawning memes like “next up: calling pasta ‘pastas.’” Nostalgia flooded in too, with stackghost reviving the age‑old “Fortran faster than C” myth, prompting replies of “citation needed” and “it’s the compiler tricks, darling.” Meanwhile, the article’s note that gfortran is required in tests (due to upstream scripts) fueled side‑eye: “beta vibes with a chaperone?”

The hottest debate: why two Fortrans on the same engine? auvi asked why LFortran and LLVM’s Flang both target LLVM (a common compiler “motor”). Fans framed it as healthy competition; skeptics smelled fragmentation drama. On the tech side, folks applauded runtime checks catching real bugs, and support for fpm’s dependencies (command‑line parsing, TOML, regex, shell‑like syntax, JSON). Translation for non‑nerds: fewer crashes, more guardrails, and lots of features—plus classic forum fireworks.

Extra credit: LFortran says medium‑sized projects are mostly solid and they’re sprinting to beta. CI (robotic testing every change) looks clean, but the memes? Gloriously messy.