First thoughts from a new user

[David_L_1]

I apologise for the length of this my first post but I hope the experiences recounted will be of value to others.

I have been programming in Fortran for about 40 years, latterly using DVF and now the Intel Compiler in the .NET envronment on a Windows PC. Earlier I used command-line mode for development including Honeywell Multics and PDP-11 OS. In parallel in recent years I have been using an Apple Mac for processing audio, still images and video, because of the user-friendliness of the associated software. The recent aquisition of a Mac Pro and the release of the Intel compiler for Mac OS has led me to start using the Mac as a Fortran development tool. I have been very impressed by the robustness of the Intel compiler on a PC, and from my first encounter the Xcode Mac IDE looked easy to use.

I bought the CD version of the Mac Pro compiler. I found that:

(1) it was very difficult to register the product as there is an incompatibility between the Intel registration process and the (standard) Mac Safari browser, which I assume most folk would use. I solved this only with help from Intel. An alternative browser (Camino?) may be OK.

(2) the versions of compiler (9.1.024) and Math Kernel Library (8.1.020) supplied on CD would not install on Mac OSX 10.4. I downloaded the latest compiler 9.1.035 and MKL 9.1.017 and these installed OK

(3) it was hard to find the instructions to set up the compiler for use within the Xcode environment (as opposed to use via the command line). The crucial set of instructions required to do this are in the "Building Applications with Xcode" section of the HTML compiler documentation, which I only found by picking it up from the penultimate line of the "Getting started with Intel Fortran Compiler for Mac OS" file.

I have now successfully written, built and run my first (very simple) Fortran program within Xcode, and it looks encouraging for future work. I hope that the Intel Fortran for Mac OS Compiler development team will extend the support for, and integration with, Xcode e.g. remove the need for manual specification of build order for complex modular programs (with many USE dependencies).

[Steven_L_Intel1]

David,

Thanks for your comments. What version of Xcode are you using? There are bugs in Xcode 2.2 and 3.0 that can cause problems. 2.3 should work ok.

[David_L_1]

Hi Steve, thanks for the response.

I'm using Xcode 2.4.1

David

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Please report problems to Intel Premier Support so that we can look into them. Thanks.