Fortran Tutorial

Fortran — born from John Backus’s 1953 IBM team, first compiler shipped 1957 — is the oldest still-active language and the undisputed workhorse of high performance computing. This track teaches modern Fortran through 2023: foundations, data and modules, reliability, the full parallel stack (OpenMP, coarrays, MPI, GPUs), Python integration, and an honest comparison with Rust and Zig.

Scope: Study the lessons in order, compile every example with gfortran, run the lab demos, and keep the official sources from the references page open.

Fortran Study Progress

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#	FORTRAN	Topic	Description
PHASE 1: LANGUAGE FOUNDATIONS
	01	Fortran Overview	Sixty-five years of history, today's dominance, why it still wins.
	02	Setup & Toolchain	Compilers, install, safety flags, and first fpm project.
	03	Fortran Syntax	Free vs fixed form, program units, statements, implicit typing trap.
	04	Type System	Intrinsic types, KIND, portable precision with selected_real_kind.
	05	Expressions	Operator precedence, logic, array expressions, intrinsics.
	06	Control Flow	IF, SELECT CASE, DO loops, CYCLE/EXIT, DO CONCURRENT.
PHASE 2: PROGRAMMING
	07	Functions & Subroutines	INTENT contracts, optional and keyword arguments, pure/elemental.
	08	Arrays	Column-major layout, slicing, constructors, WHERE, allocatable.
	09	Strings	Deferred-length characters, intrinsics, internal files, parsing.
	10	File Handling & I/O	Units, FORMAT, NAMELIST, access modes, iostat error handling.
	11	Derived Types	Type definitions, % access, arrays of records, deep copy semantics.
	12	Modules	USE/ONLY, visibility, generic interfaces, compile order, submodules.
PHASE 3: RELIABILITY & DATA
	13	Pointers	POINTER and TARGET, pointer assignment, linked structures.
	14	Error Handling	Exit codes, iostat/iomsg, IEEE traps, assertions, backtraces.
	15	Object Orientation	Type-bound procedures, inheritance, polymorphism, finalization.
	16	C Interoperability	iso_c_binding, bind(c), C_LOC/C_F_POINTER, shared libraries.
PHASE 4: HPC & PARALLEL COMPUTING
	17	Performance	Optimization flags, cache and SIMD, profiling, Amdahl's law.
	18	Parallel Computing	OpenMP fork-join, reductions, thread safety, choosing the model.
	19	Coarrays	Images, cosubscripts, sync, teams, collectives in the standard.
	20	MPI	Ranks, send/receive, collectives, domain decomposition, hybrid.
	21	GPU Programming	OpenACC, OpenMP target, CUDA Fortran, data movement.
PHASE 5: ECOSYSTEM & PERSPECTIVE
	22	Python Integration	F2PY zero-copy modules, ctypes, orchestrating simulations.
	23	Ecosystem	fpm, stdlib, BLAS/LAPACK, netCDF/HDF5, testing, CI.
	24	Fortran vs Rust vs Zig	Is Fortran a system language? The honest comparison table.
PHASE 6: PRACTICE & REFERENCE
	25	Lab Examples	Twenty-two runnable demos with a code viewer, by category.
	26	Study Projects	Statistics, OOP shapes, and heat diffusion in three parallel styles.
	27	References & Resources	Standards, compilers, playgrounds, courses, HPC APIs, community.

Credits: Lesson content of this track is original; technical claims follow the ISO standard and the official sources. See the References page for the full categorized table with playgrounds, courses, and sample repositories.

Free References

Verified free resources to keep after finishing the track — the full categorized table lives on the References & Resources page.