Since we have been discussing MinGW/gfortran so much recently, I thought it would be interesting to gather download statistics from SourceForge (at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/gcc/Version4/gcc-4.5.2-1/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/gcc/Version4/gcc-4.6.1-2/) to estimate the popularity of gfortran and other language components of MinGW/gcc, the Windows port of gcc. (It would be interesting to see similar comparisons for upstream gcc, but I don't think the numbers are publicly available as they are for MinGW/gcc.)
Below, "C" refers to the core C compiler which is designated as "core" at SourceForge, and Fortran refers to gfortran. I have included objective C/C++ in the tables in case anyone is interested although we haven't implemented PLplot bindings for that language. Java is missing because the MinGW developers are having trouble building their port of the gcc version of that compiler for both 4.5.2-1 and 4.6.1-2. Ada is missing from 4.6.1-2 for the same reason. D is missing because that is not yet an integral part of gcc and has therefore not been propagated to the Windows MinGW/gcc port of gcc. MinGW-4.5.2-1 downloads (relative to the number of C downloads which was 11815 in this case). C 1.00 Ada 0.005 C++ 0.72 Fortran 0.23 ObjC/C++ 0.29 MinGW-4.6.1-2 downloads (relative to the number of C downloads which was 3556 in this case). C 1.00 C++ 1.08 Fortran 0.45 ObjC/C++ 0.59 As I recall, the automatic installer does not even mention Ada so the low download statistics for that compiler are likely an artifact of that. I am not surprised by the popularity of C and C++, but I am surprised (and very pleased since the majority of my development experience in my early career was with Fortran 77) with the large popularity of Fortran. Obviously those prognosticators of the early 90's who claimed that Fortran would soon be dead were not correct. That might have been true if Fortran had stagnated at Fortran 77, but Fortran 95 is obviously an extremely powerful and high-level language which appears to be attracting new adherents (including me). Its also obvious from these comparisons that Arjen's on-going work on polishing our f95 bindings and examples is quite important for a substantial fraction of PLplot users. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
