Visual Studio integration degrading over time

[Andrew_Smith]

Since Fortran 2008 we have the useful module procedures. These have the arguments declared elsewhere to the body of the code, rather like c headers. Since it shortens compile-time greatly, they have become popular.

But Intel's integration into VS does not support module procedures even 14 years later with VS 2022 integration. These procedures are missing from the drop-down lists and code trees. It means that the ability to browse the source using the Visual studio navigation tools has been lost. There are many other things people would benefit from too that have never been included.

Visual studio is little more than a basic text editor with coloration when using Fortran. I wonder how many people still use Visual Studio for editing Fortran? What code editors do people recommend as alternatives for Windows?

[FortranFan]

@Andrew_Smith ,

You are correct in your observations.

Owing to an utter lack of any meaningful advancement in the editor and overall IDE experience when it comes to Intel Fortran integration with Visual Studio from a programmer and developer and code maintenance engineer perspective, each and every team I work with in industry is extremely, extremely, extremely reluctant to work with Fortran leading to a situation where every budget manager / tech lead wants to give up on Fortran and migrate the code base away to other languages that integrate so well with Visual Studio e.g., C++, C# and Visual Basic.  This is because Visual Studio is the IDE of choice but Intel Fortran experience falls way, way, way behind compared to what developers have been used to since the early 2000s.  The look and feel and reliability of Intel Fortran integration with Visual Studio since 2010s have been poorer than DEC Visual Fortran with Microsoft Visual Studio version 6.0 circa 1998 i.e., nearly 25 years ago - go figure!

Intel Software Management has basically NOT invested much of any resources beyond some limited maintenance and bug fixing for more than a decade.  A constant refrain is how difficult it is to work with Microsoft precisely when amateur enthusiasts have long been able to provide far, far, far better integrated solutions of their own with Visual Studio in open free space under Tools and Extensions in Visual Studio.  Thus the message for budget managers among the customers I work is Intel is uninterested in putting in any effort here and that nothing much will change - ever.

Your choice is either to move away from Fortran (preferable).  Or engage with a growing Fortran community elsewhere - see Fortran Discourse at https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/ and get feedback on and perhaps even nurture or develop other editors and IDEs e.g.,

1. Code::Blocks Fortran (https://cbfortran.sourceforge.io/),
2. Geany (https://www.geany.org/),
3. Notepad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/),
4. Atom(https://atom.io/), etc.