Scientists are using artificial intelligence and large language models to rewrite old code in modern languages

Scientists are using artificial intelligence and large language models to rewrite old code in modern languages, as demonstrated by a developer who translated Matplotlib to pure Fortran using AI assistance. The resulting pyplot-fortran library supports svg, png, pdf, and gif backends, all implemented in pure Fortran, and is used in JupyterLite notebooks for LFortran. The developer noted that AI made the translation process 'super easy,' enabling a full ecosystem in pure Fortran.

Beautiful. I can see you are using your own pyplot-fortran https://github.com/jacobwilliams/pyplot-fortran , which is constructing a Python string and evaluating it in Python right? . I figured, let’s translate Matplotlib to Fortran, to be more consistent with this thread: It is 100% pure Fortran, the usual pyplot-style API, and it has svg, png, pdf and even gif backends, the backends are all in pure Fortran, they generate the svg text, or png/pdf/gif binary. I embed the glyphs of a font directly into Fortran sources, support latex-style math rendering, etc. I needed something to use in the JupyterLite notebooks that LFortran now supports, so since it runs in the browser and must be fast, I needed to generate svg/png directly in pure Fortran. Anyway, it was super easy to do this thanks to AI, so I think we can now have the full ecosystem from plotting, file formats everything in pure Fortran.