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。)

Fortran速度更快有几个原因。然而，它们的重要性是如此无关紧要，或者可以通过任何方式解决，所以它不应该是重要的。现在使用Fortran的主要原因是维护或扩展遗留应用程序。

PURE and ELEMENTAL keywords on functions. These are functions that have no side effects. This allows optimizations in certain cases where the compiler knows the same function will be called with the same values. Note: GCC implements "pure" as an extension to the language. Other compilers may as well. Inter-module analysis can also perform this optimization but it is difficult. standard set of functions that deal with arrays, not individual elements. Stuff like sin(), log(), sqrt() take arrays instead of scalars. This makes it easier to optimize the routine. Auto-vectorization gives the same benefits in most cases if these functions are inline or builtins Builtin complex type. In theory this could allow the compiler to reorder or eliminate certain instructions in certain cases, but likely you'd see the same benefit with the struct { double re; double im; }; idiom used in C. It makes for faster development though as operators work on complex types in Fortran.

Fortran有更好的I/O例程，例如隐含的do工具提供了C标准库无法比拟的灵活性。

Fortran编译器直接处理更复杂的 涉及到语法，而且这样的语法不能轻易简化 参数传递形式，C不能有效地实现它。

Fortran traditionally doesn't set options such as -fp:strict (which ifort requires to enable some of the features in USE IEEE_arithmetic, a part of f2003 standard). Intel C++ also doesn't set -fp:strict as a default, but that is required for ERRNO handling, for example, and other C++ compilers don't make it convenient to turn off ERRNO or gain optimizations such as simd reduction. gcc and g++ have required me to set up Makefile to avoid using the dangerous combination -O3 -ffast-math -fopenmp -march=native. Other than these issues, this question about relative performance gets more nit-picky and dependent on local rules about choice of compilers and options.

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

一般来说，FORTRAN比C慢。C可以使用硬件级指针，允许程序员手动优化。FORTRAN(在大多数情况下)不能访问硬件内存寻址黑客。(VAX FORTRAN是另一回事。)我从70年代开始断断续续地使用FORTRAN。(真的)。

然而，从90年代开始，FORTRAN已经发展到包括特定的语言结构，可以优化成内在的并行算法，真正可以在多核处理器上运行。例如，自动矢量化允许多个处理器同时处理数据向量中的每个元素。16个处理器——16个元素向量——处理需要1/16的时间。

在C语言中，您必须管理自己的线程并为多处理仔细设计算法，然后使用一堆API调用来确保并行性正确发生。

在FORTRAN中，您只需要为多处理仔细设计算法。编译器和运行时可以为您处理其余的工作。

您可以阅读一些关于高性能Fortran的内容，但是您会发现许多死链接。你最好阅读并行编程(比如OpenMP.org)以及FORTRAN如何支持并行编程。