Degenerate Conic

Algorithms • Modern Fortran Programming • Orbital Mechanics

May 10, 2026

Fortran Compiler Updates (2026)

fortran2

Fortran compiler development continues, with regular updates across a range of compilers. Some of the recent updates are summarized below:

Intel

Intel has announced an update to their Fortran compiler (ifx), which is now at version 2026.0. ifx replaced the venerable ifort compiler a few years ago, and fully supports the Fortran 2018 standard and parts of the Fortran 2023 standard. The Fortran compiler is bundled as part of the Intel's oneAPI Toolkit. According to the release notes, there are only a few updates in this release:

  • Support for the leading zero edit mode, which allows a user to control the output of optional leading zeros in numeric outputs.
  • A coarray update related to NOTIFY_TYPE, which I don't understand. Maybe this is useful for somebody. Coarrays are the built-in MPI type feature of Fortran.
  • Support for C-style (a ? b : c) conditional expressions. This was a feature added to Fortran 2023, which is a profoundly weird fit for Fortran syntax, but it does allow a one-line short-circuited logical expression that wasn't otherwise possible before (the merge statement was the closest we had for that before but isn't quite the same).
  • Various new OpenMP 6.0 features and a new -qopenmp-threadprivate option.
  • On Windows, support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2026.

Presumably bugs have also been fixed, since the road to ifx adoption has been a little bumpy, with all new bugs that weren't present in ifort. Intel used to call out what bugs were fixed in their compilers, but they haven't done that in years, and users are left to figure out for themselves what might have been fixed.

GFortran

The GNU Project also just released GCC 16.1. According to the release notes the changes in GFortran are:

  • Coarrays using native shared memory multithreading on single node machines and handling Fortran 2018's TEAM feature.
  • Support the Fortran 2018 extensions to the import statement, the reduce intrinsic and the new generic statement.
  • The Fortran 2023 additions to the trigonometric functions are now supported (such as the sinpi intrinsic).
  • The Fortran 2023 split intrinsic subroutine is now supported and c_f_pointer now accepts an optional lower bound as an argument.
  • The -fexternal-blas64 option has been added to call external BLAS routines with 64-bit integer arguments for matmul.
  • Parameterized Derived Types (PDT) support is improved. GFortran's implementation of PDT's has been buggy and incomplete for years. PDT was a feature added in Fortran 2003 that looks like it might be useful for writing generic code, but in practice it is not very useful. Fortran 202y, the next major revision of the Fortran standard is slated to include better generics capabilities.

Honorable mentions

  • LFortran also continues to make steady progress towards its first beta release.
  • LLVM Flang development also continues, the latest release was 22.1.0. We still don't have Mac builds of this compiler available through conda, so I've never tested this one before. I've gotten this far without having to manually compile a Fortran compiler, and I'm not about to start now.

See also

posted at 12:00  ·   ·  Fortran  Gfortran  Intel