Best Fortran IDE [closed]

Answer 1

We use an in-house extension to visual studio to get code completion for our fortran code and to assist us with debugging. But even so there is a lot of room for improvement. Our main issues are:

• instability of visual studio. An error in the debugged program can crash VS.
• sometimes VS shows corrupted stacktraces (while WinDBG shows it correctly).
• debugger wont show values of variables of type CHARACTER(LEN=:), ALLOCATABLE
• Edit and Continue not supported

We used Sun workshop and it was very good, but there is no windows version.

Answer 2

I've never used it, but according to the documentation, the NetBeans C/C++ plugin also adds support for Fortran. I use NetBeans as my IDE for everything except .NET development and love it. If Fortran support is half as good as support for C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP, then it is worth looking at.

Answer 3

Geany is nice too. I use it for my small projects in Fortran. Works pretty good too.

http://www.geany.org/

Answer 4

What about these ones:

Photran - An Integrated Development Environment and Refactoring Tool for Fortran (this one is everything you need :D)

Oracle Solaris Studio Advanced C, C++ and Fortran development platform

Answer 5

jedit has a nice fortran mode and you can define keybindings for the compiler and debugger. for small to medium sized projects it is quite nice. it also has svn and multiple files search. also very nice is hypersearch where you get a list of you matches and you can go to the position with a single click. another goodie is a plugin for gdb and for ctags. you can very easily script all functions using jython. it feels a little bit like a modern version of emacs that uses python instead of lisp. check out the plugin manager. it lets you download all the plugins from the server and installs them for you (like in eclipse).

http://www.jedit.org

Answer 6

Well, as others already mentioned you could use instead of an IDE a separate text editor. Several come to mind;

1. VIM (or one of the family) - great editing capabilities, very customizable. Unfortunatelly, it is still an editor not an IDE. It can be customized in a variety of ways of course, but that gets boring after a while. Also, it's syntax highlighting capabilities are somewhat wrongly made. Also has some problems/confusions with free/fixed format and f77/f90/f95 ...

2. Emacs - pretty much same advantages/shortcomings as the above.

3. SlickEdit - has very nice fortran support; unfortunatelly, modifying it is a little annoying and the support forums are not much help.

In general, editors like the above mentioned can be used, but in that case it is best to choose one from the start and stick to it; modifying your work habits as you go; since customizing everything can be time consuming to suit your needs.

Most editors have problems with fortran's syntax, since they're used to C's (where everything that "opens" has a "close").

As far as IDE's goes, your options are not that great:

1. Silverfrost's compiler used to come with it's own IDE (Plato, if I do remember correctly; it's been a while) - don't know what happened to it, and whether it still is "alive"
2. Absoft has one of it's own as well (never used it so ...)
3. There was a specialized fortran editor I once encountered; ya...something; unfortunatelly I cannot remember it's name; maybe someone else will know
4. One of the best options (which I used to use myself, so I may be biased) is Visual Studio + Resharper, which will add a few editing features to VS's editor. Most of them can also be accomplished with macros.

This post could use some editing but it is written in a hurry, so ...