.. ############################################################################ .. File : doc/introduction.rst .. ############################################################################ ************ Introduction ************ The Fortran programming language includes many mathematical functions but few of the generic, high-performance software algorithms and data containers needed by essentially all modern scientific software. Most Fortran software contains hand-written code for such algorithms that may be burdensome to maintain and inflexible, as well as unperformant and erroneous under certain conditions. Flibcpp [#flibcpp_vers]_ is a library for use by application developers that provides native Fortran interfaces to existing high-quality algorithms and containers implemented in C++ and available on all modern computer systems. Flibcpp defines a carefully crafted set of interface files written for the SWIG-Fortran code generator :cite:`johnson_automated_2020`, an extension of SWIG :cite:`beazley_automated_2003`. These Fortran interfaces generate native Fortran proxy code that comprises a set of thin wrappers to selected functionality in the C++ standard library. The resulting code is a set of Fortran modules and C++ wrappers that expose a concise and well-defined interface that may be built into and distributed with the application. The generated modules include functionality for efficient generic sorting and searching, set operations, random number generation, value mapping, string manipulation, and dynamically resizing vectors. .. [#flibcpp_vers] This documentation is generated from Flibcpp |release|. .. ############################################################################ .. end of doc/introduction.rst .. ############################################################################