Advantage to use gfortran over gcc

Question

Venturing out the bash profile in https://repl.it/, their installation includes both gcc as well as gfortran:

gcc --version
gcc (Ubuntu 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04) 7.5.0
[...]
gfortran --version
GNU Fortran (Ubuntu 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04) 7.5.0
[...]

I have no difficulty to compile a code compliant to Fortran95 with either one of the two. Yet, as gfortran is part of gcc (reference), where are functional advantages to use either the specialist (gfortran), or the collection (gcc)?

Note that both `gcc` and `gfortran` are parts of GCC (GNU compiler collection). For `gcc` to be able to compile Fortran the Fortran frontend must be installed in the GCC installation. See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/172587/what-is-the-difference-between-g-and-gcc?rq=1 — Vladimir F Героям слава, Mar 24 '20 at 13:47
@orangecaterpillar The opposite here; only because a .f95 shall be used in pure Windows instead of Debian, I learnt about g95 and gfortran ... — Buttonwood, Mar 24 '20 at 13:57

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 24 '20 at 13:27

This is documented in the GNU Fortran manual:

A gfortran driver program is also provided, which is identical to gcc except that it automatically links the Fortran runtime libraries into the compiled program.

If your program does not depend on the Fortran run-time library, then you can link it successfully using gcc. The situation is similar to that of C++ and g++, except that C++ run-time library dependencies are perhaps more common.

Advantage to use gfortran over gcc

1 Answers1