darwin may lose primary target status on FSF gcc

[Brian Barnes]

Regarding the discussion about gcc 4.5.0 problems on darwin and the  
back-and-forth between Toby and Jack:

I have just now caught up on this thread, and I want to echo my  
support of pretty much everything Jack Howarth has said. I'm a long  
time user of gcc/gfortran for high performance scientific computing.  
The HPC world essentially revolves around two compiler suites: gcc and  
intel (although a few other commercial compilers still have notable  
followings). Both perform well on linux and OS X. Only one of them is  
free. If gcc (and hence, gfortran) support on OS X and macports is  
allowed to stagnate and die, there will be no viable free option for  
modern Fortran compilation on OS X.  g95 is simply too slow and based  
on too old of a gcc codebase to warrant consideration.

Fortran is not a 'dead' language or standard. There are many features  
of Fortran 2003 which are still being implemented in gfotran, and  
essentially all of the Fortran 2008 standard (co-arrays!) still needs  
to be implemented. The llvm/clang community appears to have nobody /  
very few people interested in implementing a Fortran front-end, and  
the gfortran maintainers are not going to branch out and start  
contributing to clang. Fortran is still used every day in scientific  
computing and the availability of a modern gcc/gfortran on OS X is a  
major reason I use macports, and, in fact, and am able to use my Mac  
for work at all (without shelling out for the Intel compilers). It is  
very important to the HPC community that macports/Apple keeps the  
latest gcc up-to-date and available!

Brian

p.s. ... I have patched the latest openmpi Portfile on my local  
machine, making the obvious changes to allow it to use gcc44 instead  
of gcc43 (the port seems stagnant). Compile + install went fine.