G.ZEEP%DEEP-THOUGHT@eddie.mit.edu (Wang Zeep) (03/18/86)
I have a feeling one reason the VAX FORTRAN/ULTRIX is not out yet is that Ultrix 1.2 is not out. I was told (2nd-hand) it requires 1.2 to work, and will not work under 4.2/4.3. Now, this could be wrong, but as it was told to somebody who could not switch to 1.2, it resulted in a total loss of sale. Prices I was originally told would be identical to the license for VMS FORTRAN for the same sized VAX under VMS. The only literature I have was snarfed, nth generation copy from December 1985. I did see a glossy brochure in February, but I lost it. [dumb] Performance increases were claimed to be 150-500%, with compilation speed increases of 200%. It mentioned C and f77 routines could be included with a "jacket-building" system to fix up calling conventions. It sounds to me like it is a very direct port of the VMS FORTRAN, with only the I/O details changed. It did say it could be used under one of the symbolic debuggers, but I can't remember which (adb or dbx). If it is just VMS FORTRAN, I'll still want it. Most of FORTRAN programs are simple number-crunchers which do not need to be 100% UNIX compatible. As long as they can dump numbers to a text file, they'll be just fine. -------
thomson@uthub.UUCP (Brian Thomson) (03/24/86)
Users of VAX UNIX f77 who can't or won't buy the new ULTRIX FORTRAN
can often get some (but, unfortunately, not all) of the added performance
just by using the new math library on their 4.2BSD systems.
f77 [...] -lnm
uses a hand-written assembly-language library for mathematical functions
that is much faster and, in cases that I have investigated, at least as
accurate as the standard library functions.
I will report performance improvement in terms of the SPICE benchmark
results posted to the Usenet mod.vlsi group (aka INFO-VLSI@SANDIA-CAD) by
[I think] Steve Greenberg of DEC. SPICE is a cpu-hungry circuit simulation
package out of Berkeley, and a particular sample problem was reported to
run in 1 minute 8 seconds on a 780 under VMS FORTRAN 4.0. The corresponding
time for 4.2BSD f77 was 2:42. Using -lnm cut this to 1:45.
--
Brian Thomson, CSRI Univ. of Toronto
{linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,utzoo}!utcsrgv!uthub!thomson