大多数帖子已经提出了令人信服的论点，所以我只是在另一个方面加上众所周知的2美分。

在处理能力方面，fortran更快或更慢是有其重要性的，但如果用fortran开发一些东西需要5倍多的时间，因为:

it lacks any good library for tasks different from pure number crunching it lack any decent tool for documentation and unit testing it's a language with very low expressivity, skyrocketing the number of lines of code. it has a very poor handling of strings it has an inane amount of issues among different compilers and architectures driving you crazy. it has a very poor IO strategy (READ/WRITE of sequential files. Yes, random access files exist but did you ever see them used?) it does not encourage good development practices, modularization. effective lack of a fully standard, fully compliant opensource compiler (both gfortran and g95 do not support everything) very poor interoperability with C (mangling: one underscore, two underscores, no underscore, in general one underscore but two if there's another underscore. and just let not delve into COMMON blocks...)

那么这个问题就无关紧要了。如果某样东西很慢，大多数时候你无法在给定的限制范围内改进它。如果你想要更快，改变算法。最后，使用电脑的时间很便宜。人类的时间不是。珍惜减少人类时间的选择。如果它增加了使用电脑的时间，无论如何它都是有成本效益的。

我是一个业余程序员，在这两种语言上我都是“平均”。 我发现编写快速Fortran代码比编写C(或c++)代码更容易。Fortran和C都是“历史悠久”的语言(按照今天的标准)，被大量使用，并且很好地支持免费和商业编译器。

我不知道这是否是一个历史事实，但Fortran感觉它是为并行/分布式/向量化/多核化而构建的。今天，当我们谈论速度时，它几乎是“标准度量”:“它能缩放吗?”

对于纯粹的cpu计算，我喜欢Fortran。对于任何与IO相关的东西，我发现使用c更容易(无论如何这两种情况都很困难)。

当然，对于并行计算密集型代码，你可能需要使用GPU。C和Fortran都有很多或多或少很好地集成了CUDA/OpenCL接口(现在还有OpenACC)。

我比较客观的回答是:如果你对这两种语言都同样了解或不了解，那么我认为Fortran更快，因为我发现用Fortran写并行/分布式代码比用c更容易(一旦你明白你可以写“自由形式”Fortran，而不仅仅是严格的F77代码)

Here is a 2nd answer for those willing to downvote me because they don't like the 1st answer : Both language have the features required to write high-performance code. So it's dependent of the algorithm you're implementing (cpu intensive ? io intensive ? memory intensive?), the hardware (single cpu ? multi-core ? distribute supercomputer ? GPGPU ? FPGA ?), your skill and ultimately the compiler itself. Both C and Fortran have awesome compiler. (i'm seriously amazed by how advanced Fortran compilers are but so are C compilers).

PS:我很高兴你特别排除了库，因为我有很多关于Fortran GUI库的不好的东西要说。：）

Fortran和C语言在特定目的上并没有哪一种语言比另一种更快。对于每种语言的特定编译器，有些编译器比其他编译器更适合某些任务。

多年来，Fortran编译器一直存在，它可以对你的数字例程施黑魔法，使许多重要的计算变得异常快速。当代的C编译器无法做到这一点。因此，在Fortran中出现了许多伟大的代码库。如果您想要使用这些经过良好测试的、成熟的、出色的库，就需要使用Fortran编译器。

我的非正式观察表明，如今人们用任何古老的语言来编码他们繁重的计算内容，如果这需要一段时间，他们就会在一些廉价的计算集群上找到时间。摩尔定律让我们所有人都成了傻瓜。

我将Fortran、C和c++的速度与netlib中的经典Levine-Callahan-Dongarra基准进行了比较。使用OpenMP的多语言版本是 http://sites.google.com/site/tprincesite/levine-callahan-dongarra-vectors C语言更丑陋，因为它一开始是自动翻译，加上某些编译器的限制和pragmas插入。 c++就是在适用的地方使用STL模板的C。在我看来，STL在是否能提高可维护性方面好坏参半。

为了了解自动函数内联在多大程度上改进了优化，只需要进行很少的练习，因为示例基于传统的Fortran实践，其中很少依赖内联。

到目前为止使用最广泛的C/ c++编译器缺乏自动向量化，而这些基准测试严重依赖于此。

关于这之前的帖子:在Fortran中使用括号来指示更快或更准确的求值顺序的例子有两个。已知的C编译器没有在不禁用更重要的优化的情况下观察括号的选项。

没有一种语言比另一种语言更快，所以正确的答案是否定的。

你真正要问的是“用Fortran编译器X编译的代码是否比用C编译器Y编译的等效代码更快?”这个问题的答案当然取决于您选择哪两个编译器。

人们可能会问的另一个问题是“考虑到在他们的编译器中优化投入了相同的精力，哪个编译器会生成更快的代码?” 这个问题的答案实际上是Fortran。Fortran编译器有一些优势:

Fortran had to compete with Assembly back in the day when some vowed never to use compilers, so it was designed for speed. C was designed to be flexible. Fortran's niche has been number crunching. In this domain code is never fast enough. So there's always been a lot of pressure to keep the language efficient. Most of the research in compiler optimizations is done by people interested in speeding up Fortran number crunching code, so optimizing Fortran code is a much better known problem than optimizing any other compiled language, and new innovations show up in Fortran compilers first. Biggie: C encourages much more pointer use than Fortran. This drasticly increases the potential scope of any data item in a C program, which makes them far harder to optimize. Note that Ada is also way better than C in this realm, and is a much more modern OO Language than the commonly found Fortran77. If you want an OO langauge that can generate faster code than C, this is an option for you. Due again to its number-crunching niche, the customers of Fortran compilers tend to care more about optimization than the customers of C compilers.

然而，没有什么能阻止人们在C编译器的优化上投入大量精力，并使其生成比他们平台的Fortran编译器更好的代码。事实上，C编译器产生的较大销售额使得这种情况非常可行

There is another item where Fortran is different than C - and potentially faster. Fortran has better optimization rules than C. In Fortran, the evaluation order of an expressions is not defined, which allows the compiler to optimize it - if one wants to force a certain order, one has to use parentheses. In C the order is much stricter, but with "-fast" options, they are more relaxed and "(...)" are also ignored. I think Fortran has a way which lies nicely in the middle. (Well, IEEE makes the live more difficult as certain evaluation-order changes require that no overflows occur, which either has to be ignored or hampers the evaluation).

另一个更聪明的规则领域是复数。这不仅是因为直到c99才有了它们，而且Fortran中管理它们的规则更好;由于gfortran的Fortran库部分是用C编写的，但实现了Fortran语义，GCC获得了这个选项(也可以用于“普通”C程序):

-fcx-fortran-rules 复杂的乘法和除法遵循Fortran规则。范围缩减是作为复杂除法的一部分进行的，但是没有检查复杂乘法或除法的结果是否是“NaN + I*NaN”，试图在这种情况下挽救这种情况。

The alias rules mentioned above is another bonus and also - at least in principle - the whole-array operations, which if taken properly into account by the optimizer of the compiler, can lead faster code. On the contra side are that certain operation take more time, e.g. if one does an assignment to an allocatable array, there are lots of checks necessary (reallocate? [Fortran 2003 feature], has the array strides, etc.), which make the simple operation more complex behind the scenes - and thus slower, but makes the language more powerful. On the other hand, the array operations with flexible bounds and strides makes it easier to write code - and the compiler is usually better optimizing code than a user.

总的来说，我认为C和Fortran的速度差不多;选择应该更多的是你更喜欢哪种语言，或者是使用Fortran的全数组操作及其更好的可移植性更有用，还是使用C中更好的系统接口和图形用户界面库。