OpenFortran: Extending Fortran with Meta-programming

Meta-programming has shown much promise for improving the quality of software by offering programming language techniques to address issues of modularity, reusability, maintainability, and extensibility. A system that supports metaprogramming is able to generate or manipulate other programs to extend their behavior. This paper describes OpenFortran, a Meta-Object Protocol (MOP) that is able to bring the power of meta-programming to Fortran, one of the most widely used languages in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC). OpenFortran provides a framework that allows library developers to build arbitrary source-to-source program transformation libraries for Fortran programs. To relieve the burden of learning the details about how the underlying transformations are performed, a domain-specific language named SPOT has been created that allows developers to specify direct manipulation of programs. The paper provides a general motivation for using a MOP in HPC and offers details about the implementation of OpenFortran and SPOT. As an example, the paper demonstrates how to use the framework to build a simple profiling library. Keywords—Meta-programming; program transformation; Meta-Object Protocol; Domain-Specific Language;