Why is Fortran compiler support on Mac OS so limited by Mathworks?

Why is Mathworks making life so difficult or expensive for us? Why do we need to jump through hoops, hacking xml scripts to get mex gfortran to work on a Mac? Why is only a commercial Fortran license supported on the Mac platform?

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/241982-plots-are-shown-as-upper-left-cropped-on-osx-in-2015b#comment_309095

Answer 1

[Andreas Goser]

I am not sure what are you referring to. If I visit the supported compiler page, click on the Mac tab, I see Xcode 8.x and 9.x being supported and free of charge.

[Uday]

Xcode doesn't have Fortran. GNU Fortran (gfortran) is not supported.

[Andreas Goser]

OK, I made a mistake (a certain misinterpretation).

What I know from daily customer interaction is, the number of Mac users is relatively small compared to Windows and also Linux. But especially, the use of FORTRAN for MEX files is very low. So looking at the combination of this, I wonder if there is larger need to support this combination. My suggestion is to contact MathWorks support including sharing the uses case, so that development has the data to make prioritization decisions.

[jg614]

I realize this is an old thread, but for what it's worth, as long as the absolute cheapest non-academic option for a Fortran compiler for Mac and Windows is $840 a year, the use of Fortran for MEX files is likely to remain low compared to C and C++ which have free compilers.

[Robert]

Except that you can get free fortran compilers for Mac as well -- http://hpc.sourceforge.net

[jg614]

I realize that, I should have specified the "cheapest non-academic option allowed by MathWorks," but I didn't want to add so many qualifiers that it would become unreadable. My point was that MathWorks is arbitrarily forcing users to use expensive products for Fortran compilation on Windows and Mac platforms when gfortran will work just fine on both, free of charge.

Interestingly, I notice that Mac support for gfortran was dropped the same year they added the Intel Fortran compiler: https://www.mathworks.com/content/dam/mathworks/mathworks-dot-com/support/sysreq/files/SystemRequirements-Release2015a_SupportedCompilers.pdf