[MPI3 Fortran] Deprecate mpif.h?

[Bill Long]

Nick Maclaren wrote:

> 
> I.e., in the long term, all programmers and all programs should convert
> to MPI3.  But, given that the TR which it will depend on is still under
> development, "in the long term" means decades.  But there really is no
> alternative, because the language infrastructure on which the existing
> MPI interfaces depend is getting increasingly unreliable.
> 

I agree with this, but think it is worth noting that there are two time 
scales involved.  The long horizon is getting user codes migrated to the 
new module. This one is the "decades" referred to above. There will no 
doubt be a very long tail.  The shorter time scale is for availability 
of compilers that incorporate the features of the TR. Although it is 
still under development, it is pretty far along.  Recent changes will 
make the implementation more work,  but I still expect to see compilers 
that support the TR in 2011 (as opposed to my previous expectation of 
the end of this year).  The TR features can be implemented on top of an 
existing Fortran 2003 compiler - it is not necessary for the vendor to 
implement the new features of Fortran 2008 first.  It is not even 
required that all of Fortran 2003 be implemented before the TR.  You 
really just need the support for C interoperability and allocatable 
dummy arguments from Fortran 2003, and most compilers already support 
those features.

Cheers,
Bill

-- 
Bill Long                                           longb at cray.com
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