CVF vs. IVF

[wiland]

I have a fewquestions concerning upgrading from Compaq Visual Fortran 6.6 to Intel Visual Fortran 8.0.

While I have owned it and upgraded, myFortran compiler has undergone many changes in labeling/ownership from IBM to DEC to Compaq to HP (and now Intel?) that I am a bit confused. Will Compaq VF continue to be developed or is it at the end of its lifewith Intel VFbeing the new upgrade path?

I have a number of programs that use DFWIN, DFLIB, DFLOGM, and DFNSL modules. A PDF document on the Intel website by Steve Lioneldiscussesporting CVF to IVFand indicates that the use of some of these modules is problematic with Intel Fortran 7.0.The documentseemed to imply that a future Visual version would not have these problems but the PDF has not been updatedsince the introduction of Intel VF 8.0. Will I be able to compile my CVF 6.6 code using the IVF 8.0 compiler without making any changes?

Will the Visual Developer Studio I am now using with CVF 6.6 continue to work with IVF 8.0 or will I have to purchase and learn some other Developer Studio?

Finally, Steve Lionel indicated in this forum that the CVF 6.6C update was available and then later said it had been pulled. The Compaq VF support page does not show this update as being available. What is the status of this update and is it available somewhere?

Any other comments concerning the pros/cons of upgrading from CVF to IVF would be welcome.

Thank you.

Bruce Wiland

[Steven_L_Intel1]

CVF is no longer being developed.

Sorry about the porting document not being updated. I'm working on that. IVF includes all (I think) of the predefined modules with stubs of the old names, so your existing code should, in most cases, simply need a rebuild. The problems noted in the old porting document no longer apply.

You will need to use the new Visual C++.NET IDE.

6.6C will get reissued, probably sometime in the next week.

[wiland]

Does the Visual C++.NET IDE come with theIVF 8.0 upgrade (from CVF 6.6) or is this something I must purchase separately?

Is the newinterface significantly different from the Visual Developer Studio that I have been using with CVF 6.6 (i.e.,how long of a learning curve)? Will it be able to import the workspaces and projects in my current Visual Developer Studio?

Thanks,

Bruce

[wiland]

I found the followingsoftware/operating system requirements on the Intel website for IVF 8.0. It does not mention Windows XP Home, but it also does not say that it is unsupported. WillIVF 8.0 work with Windows XP Home?

Software Requirements to Develop IA-32 or Itanium-based Applications on an IA-32 System

• Windows NT* 4.0 with Service Pack 6 or higher, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows .NET Server 7.0, Windows Server 2003
  Note: Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 98 SE*, and Windows Millennium Edition* are no longer supported for product development, but are supported for application deployment.
• Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2002 Standard edition or above, Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2003 Standard edition or above.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

You will need to purchase Visual C++.NET separately. The "Standard Edition" will do, it has a street price of under $80.

The interface is a bit different, but nothorribly so- I'll cover that in my porting document. Yes, project conversion from CVF is provided. It's a two-step process. First, you open the workspace in VC.NET, which wll ask if you want to convert to a VC.NET "solution". Then for each project, right click on it and select "Extract Compaq Visual Fortran Project Items. This is pretty clever, and will handle mixed-language projects (it has to split them into two single-language projects.)

XP Home is supported (there's a page on the web site that says XP Professional, but it's wrong.)

[John_S_8]

I have a large solution with lots of subprojects, and while the extract CVF... is handy, it unfortunately causes the VM of the DFDEV to grow to enormous levels, over 450MB in my case, where the old CVF DevStudio was about 60MB. As you can imagine, my machine performance takes a huge hit. Have any of you experienced such a phenomenon?

[John_S_8]

I have a large solution with lots of subprojects, and while the extract CVF... is handy, it unfortunately causes the VM of the DFDEV to grow to enormous levels, over 450MB in my case, where the old CVF DevStudio was about 60MB. As you can imagine, my machine performance takes a huge hit. Have any of you experienced such a phenomenon?

[Steven_L_Intel1]

No, haven't seen that. You don't really mean DFDEV, though, do you? That's not part of Intel Visual Fortran.

Does the memory usage stay if you reopen the solution?

[John_S_8]

I do mean DFDEV. It is of reasonable size when I first open the CVF DSW, but as soon as I start exporting the CVF project settings for each project in the solution, the VM size and the memory usage of DFDEV grow rapidly. A Microsoft problem or an Intel problem?

[guyver18_2003]

Hello, I'm new to this forum so please excuse me to drop in. I'm evaluating the Intel Fortran compiler and trying to test my CVF 6 program with it.My program need to link with four vendor supply lib files (BTM1.LIB to BTM4.LIB). The compilation seems OK but it fail when building theEXE. The compiler return a message "fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'dfor.lib'".

The vendor supply lib files are suppose to becompiled by CVF 5.0 and I supect that it used the option of "defaultlib:dfor.lib' and some other lib in it.

Is there workaround for this?

Thanks n brgds

Guyver

[Steven_L_Intel1]

You MUST recompile all Fortran code with the Intel compiler. You cannot use staticlibraries that were built with other compilers (especially DVF/CVF). You will need to get new libraries from the vendor that were built with Intel Fortran (or are supplied as a DLL, which breaks the dependence on the compiler.)

[guyver18_2003]

That's seems a big problem to me. It's seems not so easy to ask the big foe to tailor make the product for the little client.

Anyway, thanks sblionel.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Sorry, it's not arbitrary. If we could have reasonably kept binary compatibility, we would have. We know it's a pain.

[durisinm]

Steve,

Have you finished updating the porting document? If so, then where can I get a copy?

Mike D.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I will post it here later today.