FC Is Yet Another LLVM Fortran Compiler, Now Targeting The New MLIR IR

While the Flang/f18 compiler is expected to land in the LLVM 10.0 source tree on Monday, another Fortran LLVM front-end continues in development.

FC is another Fortran compiler for LLVM that is completely separate from the likes of Flang and f18 compilers. FC was announced last year as a new Fortran compiler being developed by little-known compiler consulting firm CompilerTree. At the time they said their Fortran compiler was delivering comparable performance to Flang and GCC's Fortran (Gfortran).

In a new report today, they shared the FC compiler has been re-based to using MLIR rather than LLVM IR. MLIR is the new IR added to the LLVM code recently and will premiere in LLVM 10.0. MLIR is developed by Google and others with a focus on being a machine learning focused compiler intermediate representation. MLIR has shown to be quite promising and it's interesting this Fortran compiler by CompilerTree is quickly targeting this IR.

They say they plan to post the open-source code of FC next year. They are working on OpenMP support for this Fortran MLIR-based compiler and other features. It will be interesting to see how this Fortran compiler performs once released and if they opt for the LLVM license or a more restrictive license.

FC appears to be solely the work of CompilerTree, which is focused on embedded compiler software and counts AMD as one of their customers.