netorcai-client-fortran

FORTRAN 2003 version of the netorcai client library.

This client make few assumptions (that will not be fixed unless someone propose a pull request to solve them):

• The client target 64 bits Linux systems only (wrapping system calls is needed to handle sockets and processes in FORTRAN)
• UTF-8 is not supported (not nativelly by the language, supported by gfortran but its experimental and the resulting code is cumbersome): non-ascii unicode characters are replaced by '?' ones
• FORTRAN 2003 is used for the following reasons:
  • Standard/Working variable-length strings (introduced in FORTRAN 2003) are not available before and fixed strings results in both an insane API and an innefficient parser
  • Object-oriented (introduced in FORTRAN 2003) provide a cleaner and more usable API
  • It would be hard to write internal data structures (eg. variable-length generic arrays) similar to those required for the parser that would otherwise be much slower (with a quadratic complexity rather than simply linear)
  • FORTRAN 2008 is not currently fully supported by gfortran

This client has been successfully tested with the GNU FORTRAN compiler (gfortran).

Installation

The library uses the Meson build system (and therefore uses Ninja).

# Create build directory.
meson build # --prefix=/desired/installation/prefix

# Build the library (and the unit test executables) in the build directory.
ninja -C build

# Run the unit tests
ninja -C build test

# Install the library
ninja -C build install

Usage

Feel free to look at hello world examples to build your own clients.