forums.silverfrost.com

[gperiskic]

Does FTN support .NET-Core or .NET-Standard and are there any windows dependencies in the FTN redistributable dlls? We would like to deploy our with FTN compiled dlls on Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) for increased scalability with a microservices architecture.
It would be nice to have to possibility to target either .NET Standard (for broad compatibility) or at least .NET 4.7.2 (or higher) as recommended here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/, which ensures that API alternatives can be used for .NET Framework-specific targets when .NET Core doesn't support a particular API.

[Robert]

FTN95 does not support .NET Core. It is a different format and specification.

[gperiskic]

Hi Robert,
thanks. What about my other questions - would it be possible that the .NET compiler targets .NET Framework 4.7.2 or higher? Or maybe to directly target .NET Standard?
The way I understand this, .NET Standard is a set of basic .NET APIs whach are commeon to .NET framework, .NET Core and other .NET derivates (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/?view=netstandard-2.0). It is a kind of .NET Framework without the support for WPF, WinForms and ASP.Net. Most of the Fortran code doesn't target these .NET Framework specific APIs anyway - hardly someone makes a GUI in Fortran nowdays. Probably 90% of Fortran is scientific code written by engineers in 80s and 90s - and .NET Standard APIs could be more than sufficaint for this.
What do You think?
Cheers,
Goran

[John-Silver]

Goran wrote:

[LitusSaxonicum]

Well I agree. Not many people in the world of software development are creating GUI interfaces in Fortran, probably because people are (a) using other languages for the task, and (b) many Fortran-coded things probably don't need a GUI. If you do need a Windows GUI and you have to program in Fortran, then there are alternatives to FTN95 and Clearwin+, so that 'not many people' still represents a market of some size. Personally, Clearwin+ is by far the easiest way to do the job, especially as it is properly integrated in FTN95. FTN95 has, in my opinion, what the Fortran standard needs, and the biggest needs are graphics and the tools to build GUIs. FTN95 is a one-stop-shop for everything you need.

I recently asked in another post for someone to tell me what the advantages of ,NET and Visual Studio are, and all I got from the end of it was that it was a matter of personal preference.

Oh, and I forgot to say that some of that body of people programming in Fortran do it as a sideline, and are using skills largely acquired decades ago. .NET is a new trick, and they (or should I say we?) are old dogs.

Eddie

[anthony.sneed]

For the broadest compatibility it is recommended that class libraries should target .NET Standard (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/net-standard), versus a specific .NET implementation (.NET Framework, .NET Core, etc). .NET Standard, which is forward-compatible, essentially represents a more modern approach to Portable Class Libraries. For example, if you were to target .NET Standard 1.1 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/libraries#how-to-target-the-net-standard), the resulting assemblies would be compatible with the full .NET Framework version 4.5 or greater (4.5.x, 4.6.x, 4.7.x, etc), as well as .NET Core version 1.0 or greater (1.x, 2.x, 3.x, etc).

Because of this broad compatibility, .NET Standard assemblies can be compiled (JIT, pre-JIT, etc) to run on various flavors of Windows (Server Core, Nano, etc) and also on Linux. This can have benefits for applications that run in Docker containers, where the platform options can affect scalability and performance.

Would you consider updating the Silverfrost compiler to target .NET Standard?