focal VS http-client

Lately, it has been great to see libraries like hipfort (https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipfort) and focal (https://github.com/LKedward/focal) come around to offer portable GPU offloading in Fortran.

Fortran-lang's role (as an open-source org) has been 4-pronged: Tooling (build system and package manager, testing, eventually compilers etc.), modernized and maintained libraries (stdlib, minpack, fftpack, etc.), community space (Discourse), and evangelism/marketing (website, Twitter, blog posts etc.). Some members participate in the standardization process of the language, but the groups and processes are separate and complementary.

It's true that one goal may be to pick an important race and try to win it.

Another goal, in my view more important, is to make Fortran more pleasant to use for people/Orgs who need it (there are many) and for people who love it (there are many).

I've found that more often than not, people/teams first like working with a technology, and then come up with technical arguments for why that technology is the best choice. Often the arguments are valid, sometimes they're made up, but ultimately underneath it all you either like it or not and that's all that matters. My goal with Fortran-lang has been to slowly and continuously increase the surface area of Fortran's likability. Fortran is not for everyone, but for people who think it may be, we can work to make it better and more pleasant to use.

As one example, we just released a small library to make high-level HTTP requests from Fortran applications: https://github.com/fortran-lang/http-client. This was a product of one of our Google Summer of Code contributors.