Absoft has announced advancements for customers developing and maintaining Fortran programs on Mac OS/Intel systems.
These improvements affect three areas of code development, which are incorporated into Absoft's newly released Pro Fortran v10.2 for Mac OS/Intel: increased application speed; superior debugging; and new tools.
The primary increase in application speed is a result of Absoft's support for Intel's SSE4.1 vector instructions.
Absoft Pro Fortran v10.2 automatically determines processor type and optimises for SSE4.1 vector extensions when appropriate.
Absoft said that internal tests have demonstrated SSE4.1 can increase speed up to 10 per cent on several types of code - automatically, without code changes.
Improved Fortran debugging with Pro Fortran v10.2 is provided using Absoft's latest FX3 debugger with Apple's Xcode 3.1.
Absoft customers can now display and modify the values of program variables located in Common blocks, allocated in static storage, or declared inside Fortran 90 modules.
These capabilities are available when debugging either 32-bit or 64-bit executables on Mac OS/Intel systems.
The updated Pro Fortran v10.2 IDE simplifies code development and maintenance with Absoft's Fortran parallel make facility.
First, the parallel make can decrease build times for large projects by using multi-core architectures and compiling two or more independent program units simultaneously.
Second, Absoft's make facility automatically determines Fortran module dependencies.
This eliminates the need to continually track and order compilation sequences by hand, as is required when using alternative compilers.
