Simply Fortran 3.34 Available!
Posted on March 15, 2024
Approximatrix is happy to announce the availability of Simply Fortran 3.34 for all supported platforms. The latest release revamps cosmetic and internals of the macOS and Linux versions of the development environment, fixes numerous bugs, some severe, for all platforms, and improves Fortran module dependency calculations.
On all platforms, the debugger, where supported, now reports variables far quicker to the development environment. This speed improvement also resolves possible drawing issues on Linux and macOS when numerous local variables were present. Internally, the interface to the debugger received some reliability improvements with respect to memory allocation, which could eliminate possible crashes during debugging sessions. An additional form insert, "Used Module List," is available to allow graphical selection of modules to add to the current scope. A crash caused by the automated insert system has been fixed.
Module dependency calculations, necessary for performing project builds, now pass source code files, if appropriate, through the preprocessor. Using the preprocessor, triggered during compilation by either a flag in Project Options or using an uppercase Fortran extension, allows conditional blocks to be evaluated, such as #ifdef. The module calculations will now also execute the preprocessor to correctly evaluate conditional blocks, preprocessor includes, and other possible preprocessor macros. This change should allow complex projects that rely on nonstandard preprocessor macros to compile correctly within the development environment. Background worker threads are now shut down in a more reliable manner on all platforms.
The development environment on macOS and Linux has been updated to better conform to modern GTK+ standards. Informational messages that were previously displayed in popups (which could cause lockups on macOS) are now using informational bars revealed when appropriate. Popup menus are now relying on GTK+ Popover widgets, which provide a more modern look and more exact contextual indicators. Search bars for editor tabs are now implemented as Revealers. Possible crashes on macOS caused by attempting to search for libraries outside the application bundle have been fixed.
AppGraphics now includes procedures to load images directly into memory rather than having to display them immediately. As a companion routine, a scaling procedure was added for in-memory images. These user-requested features should make image handling more sensible within the graphics toolkit.
The new version is available for all platforms on the Download page.