Simply Fortran Version 3.19 Released

After a long development cycle, Approximatrix is happy to announce the availability of Simply Fortran 3.19 for all supported platforms. This release incorporates several bug fixes and compatibility improvements on all platforms, cosmetic and compatibility fixes for the Windows release, and increased functionality in the Apple Silicon macOS release.

In the Project Options window, selecting initialization of variables to zero and enabling coarrays are now mutually exclusive as this combination would lead to crashes of compiled Fortran code. Syntax checking will now default to the syntax of files in the current project if multiple projects contain similarly-named files.

On Windows, additional high dots-per-inch display fixes have been included to better calculate the sizes of some components within the development environment. Launching a compiled code on Windows now occurs in the background. Prior releases would rely on launching in the foreground, which could cause the user interface to lock up on slower systems. Additionally, the detection of a failed launch will now timeout after 30 seconds rather than the original 3 seconds, allowing more time for real-time virus scanners to release the request to launch the executable. Errors reported from failed launches due to timeout are now properly reported as ERROR_TIMEOUT (1460). A bug in the compiler's runtime library on Windows related to some quad-precision mathematics has been fixed.

On GNU/Linux, Simply Fortran's base library set has been upgraded to Debian 10. This upgrade may cause issues with older distributions, such as Ubuntu 16.04 or earlier. However, Simply Fortran no longer shows graphical artifacts in some text boxes, and a number of incorrectly themed icons have been eliminated on Ubuntu 20.04 and higher. Simply Fortran's packaging now uses the current AppImage release. An intermittent crash caused by resetting a timer controlling the development environment's status bar has been fixed. Minor Lintian issues with our distributed deb archives have been fixed.

On macOS, the "modern" releases are now based on and compatible with Big Sur 11.4 or higher. These modern releases now include the latest OpenMPI releases for improved coarray support. This release is also the first to include support for OpenMPI and coarrays on Apple Silicon.

The AppGraphics library on Windows now includes a function to suppress the closing of a window via a callback routine. Such functionality may be desired if developers wish to confirm closing a window if there is unsaved work. Crashes caused by requesting keyboard interaction when no window is open have been eliminated.

The latest release is available from the Download page. If Simply Fortran proves useful, please consider purchasing a license.