OpenGL Adopts NIST Fortran 90 Binding
March 1998
The Fortran 90 bindings for the OpenGL graphics library developed by
William Mitchell of ITL's Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division
have been approved by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) as the
official OpenGL Fortran 90 interface. The bindings have also been endorsed
by X3J3, the U.S. Fortran Standards Committee.
OpenGL is a software interface for applications to generate interactive
2D and 3D computer graphics. OpenGL is designed to be independent of operating
system, window system, and hardware operations, and is supported by many
vendors, with products for computing platforms from PCs to supercomputers.
The ARB is the governing board of OpenGL, and consists of members from
a variety of companies with penGL products including Digital Equipment,
Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Intergraph, Microsoft
and Silicon Graphics.
Adoption of the OpenGL Fortran 90 bindings represents a significant
development for scientific visualization in the Fortran community. Until
now there has never been an industry standard for generating graphics from
Fortran programs; instead, only proprietary libraries that support a limited
number of systems have been available. With the new bindings, a Fortran
programmer can write standard-conforming graphics applications that will
be portable over most computing platforms.
In conjunction with this work, Mitchell has developed f90gl, a public
domain reference implementation of the Fortran 90 bindings (http://math.nist.gov/f90gl).
Since its initial release over a year ago, it has been downloaded approximately
1200 times. With the standardization of the bindings, it is anticipated
that the rate will increase, and that vendors will use f90gl as the basis
for their products. Several vendors have already expressed such interest,
including Absoft, Avid Technology, Imagine1, Lahey Computer Systems,
NASoftware, and Salford Software.
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