Making legacy Fortran code type safe through automated program transformation

Fortran is still widely used in scientific computing, and a very large corpus of legacy as well as new code is written in FORTRAN 77. In general this code is not type safe, so that incorrect programs can compile without errors. In this paper, we present a formal approach to ensure type safety of leg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of supercomputing Vol. 78; no. 2; pp. 2988 - 3028
Main Author: Vanderbauwhede, Wim
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.02.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Algorithms
Automation
Compilers
Computer Science
Errors
FORTRAN
Interpreters
Processor Architectures
Programming Languages
Safety
Subroutines
Transformations
Type system
Type safety
Acceleration
Program transformation
Fortran
ISSN:0920-8542, 1573-0484
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Fortran is still widely used in scientific computing, and a very large corpus of legacy as well as new code is written in FORTRAN 77. In general this code is not type safe, so that incorrect programs can compile without errors. In this paper, we present a formal approach to ensure type safety of legacy Fortran code through automated program transformation. The objective of this work is to reduce programming errors by guaranteeing type safety. We present the first rigorous analysis of the type safety of FORTRAN 77 and the novel program transformation and type checking algorithms required to convert FORTRAN 77 subroutines and functions into pure, side-effect free subroutines and functions in Fortran 90. We have implemented these algorithms in a source-to-source compiler which type checks and automatically transforms the legacy code. We show that the resulting code is type safe and that the pure, side-effect free and referentially transparent subroutines can readily be offloaded to accelerators.
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ISSN:0920-8542
1573-0484
DOI:10.1007/s11227-021-03839-9