Using this code

This is a project made out of dummy code taken from tutorials of the different tools I put together, for learning how to interconnect a build system with documentation and testing systems for projects in fortran.

If you already have meson and doxygen installed and would like to compile this code, do:

meson setup build

to configure the project. The build directory wil be contain all the build artifacts, only some content will be downloaded into subfolders, that I am ignoring from git. If somebody knows how to direct meson to download inside the build directory as cmake does let me know.

Then you can build the project using ninja

ninja -C build

And run the tests through meson with

meson test -C build

to generate documentation using Doxygen, compile the doc target with:

meson compile doc -C build

and then open the index.html file located in build\html with a web browser.

Buildsystems for fortran

From fortran-lang.org resources candidates are:

• meson
• scon
• cmake

I will follow the provided tutorial in this project to take an informed decision.

meson

So far my first experience with it. Looking forward to working with it. I have used ninja before through cmake projects. meson seams to address key issues I have runned before into from cmake perspective. I think is worth giving it a try. Here a cool resources page on how to do X in meson.

Related topics

Outlook to desired features beyond the build system itself.

Documentation system

From previous experience I stay with Doxygen. Its Fortran support is enough for my needs. See section "Comment blocks in Fortran".

As a vim user I found usefull (thanks to chatgpt) UltiSnips a great tool. I tried to implement dynamic snippets at could be expanded at runtime depending of the number of parameters of a routine and for functions if it had a return value, but failed to make them run properly. So I stepped back to having single liner snippets to generate and insert this templates as I type the code, here I share an extract of my snippets.fortran file.

snippet db "Doxygen brief line" b
!> @brief ${1:Short description}
endsnippet

snippet dp "parameter with direction choice" b
!> @param[${1|in,out,inout|}] ${2:name} ${3:description}
endsnippet

snippet dr "Doxygen return line" b
!> @return ${1:description of return value}
endsnippet

snippet dd "Doxygen details line" b
!> @details ${1:More information.}
endsnippet

snippet de "Doxygen empty comment line."
!>
endsnippet

So that while in vim insert mode, in a fortran file (.f90), when I type one of the snippet names and hit <tab> I get into SELECT mode and can replace the placeholder text with whatever I want to document, jump around place holders with <tab> and backwards with <Shift-tab>. For example if I type dp<tab> I get my parameter with direction choice snippet expanded, and I can choose, in the first field with 1, 2 or 3 whether in, out or inout stay. Then after <tab> I am editing the parameter name, and another <tab> and I am in the description field.

Note: hit <esc> only at the end when all place holders have been replaced, otherwise, there is no way to reexpand the snippet once out.

Test system

After an overview of available alternatives documented in the fortran-wiki and my wish to stay as simple as possible, I will try test-drive. Here included also the getting started code for test-drive.

Concluding remarks

We have achieved (with chatgpt assisting me parse some sparse documentation)

• to set up a build system for Fortran project using meson
• document the code using Doxygen blocks with the help of UltiSnips.
• integrate doc target into meson
• to add test-drive as testing system and integrate it to meson project.