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。

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。

Fortran和C之间的速度差异更多的是编译器优化和特定编译器使用的底层数学库的函数。Fortran没有什么固有的特性可以使它比C更快。

不管怎样，一个优秀的程序员可以用任何语言编写Fortran。

是的，在1980年;在2008年?取决于

当我开始专业编程时，Fortran的速度优势正受到挑战。我记得我在Dr. Dobbs上读到过这篇文章，并把这篇文章告诉了年长的程序员——他们都笑了。

所以我对此有两种观点，理论上的和实际的。从理论上讲，今天的Fortran与C/ c++甚至任何允许汇编代码的语言相比，并没有内在的优势。在实践中，今天的Fortran仍然享有围绕优化数值代码而建立的历史和文化遗产的好处。

Up until and including Fortran 77, language design considerations had optimization as a main focus. Due to the state of compiler theory and technology, this often meant restricting features and capability in order to give the compiler the best shot at optimizing the code. A good analogy is to think of Fortran 77 as a professional race car that sacrifices features for speed. These days compilers have gotten better across all languages and features for programmer productivity are more valued. However, there are still places where the people are mainly concerned with speed in scientific computing; these people most likely have inherited code, training and culture from people who themselves were Fortran programmers.

当人们开始谈论代码优化时，会有很多问题，了解这一点的最好方法是潜伏在那些工作是快速编写数字代码的人身上。但是请记住，这种高度敏感的代码通常只占整个代码行的一小部分，而且非常专门:许多Fortran代码就像其他语言中的许多其他代码一样“低效”，优化甚至不应该是此类代码的主要关注点。

要开始了解Fortran的历史和文化，维基百科是一个很好的地方。Fortran维基百科的条目是一流的，我非常感谢那些花时间和精力使它对Fortran社区有价值的人。

(这个答案的缩短版本本可以在Nils开始的优秀帖子中发表评论，但我没有这样做的业力。实际上，如果不是因为这个帖子有实际的信息内容和分享，而不是激烈的争吵和语言偏见，我可能根本不会写任何东西，这是我对这个主题的主要经验。我不知所措，不得不分享这份爱。)

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。

有趣的是，这里的很多答案都来自于不懂语言。这对于那些打开过旧的FORTRAN 77代码并讨论过其弱点的C/ c++程序员来说尤其如此。

我认为速度问题主要是C/ c++和Fortran之间的问题。在大型代码中，它总是取决于程序员。有一些语言特性是Fortran优于的，而一些特性是C优于的。所以，在2011年，没有人能真正说出哪一个更快。

About the language itself, Fortran nowadays supports Full OOP features and it is fully backward compatible. I have used the Fortran 2003 thoroughly and I would say it was just delightful to use it. In some aspects, Fortran 2003 is still behind C++ but let's look at the usage. Fortran is mostly used for Numerical Computation, and nobody uses fancy C++ OOP features because of speed reasons. In high performance computing, C++ has almost no place to go(have a look at the MPI standard and you'll see that C++ has been deprecated!).

现在，您可以简单地使用Fortran和C/ c++进行混合语言编程。Fortran中甚至有GTK+的接口。有免费的编译器(gfortran, g95)和许多优秀的商业编译器。