Installation

Requirements

• A Fortran 2008 compiler with the C preprocessor (the sources are .F90). forbear is tested on every push with gfortran 13, 14 and 15 (and the gfortran 16 trunk), Intel ifx 2025.3 and NVIDIA nvfortran 26.1, with FoBiS, and with fpm; it also builds and passes its tests with gfortran 11 and 12 and nvfortran 26.5.
• FACE (ANSI colours), fetched into src/third_party by every build system.
• A terminal that understands ANSI escape sequences and the carriage return: see Behaviour and limitations.

FoBiS

FoBiS (3.8+) is the reference build system of forbear.

git clone https://github.com/szaghi/forbear && cd forbear
fobis fetch                         # FACE into src/third_party, at the commit pinned by its fobos.lock
fobis build --mode static-gnu       # static/libforbear.a, modules in static/mod
fobis build --mode shared-gnu       # shared/libforbear.so
fobis build --mode tests-gnu        # the test programs into exe/
bash scripts/run_tests.sh           # run them
fobis build --mode tests-intel      # the same with Intel ifx, tests-nvf with NVIDIA nvfortran
fobis build --lmodes                # every mode (GNU, Intel ifx, NVIDIA nvfortran; debug variants)

fobis fetch --update moves FACE to its latest commit and updates src/third_party/fobos.lock.

The library archive contains FACE too, so a program needs only libforbear.a and the module directory:

gfortran -I static/mod my_program.f90 static/libforbear.a -o my_program

The GNU modes define UCS4_SUPPORTED and ASCII_SUPPORTED, which give the UCS4 and ASCII character kinds their own values; the Intel and NVIDIA modes do not, and both kinds fall back to the default character kind there. Plain (default kind) string literals work everywhere, Unicode ones included, provided the source file is UTF-8.

fpm

Add forbear as a dependency in your project's fpm.toml:

[dependencies]
forbear = { git = "https://github.com/szaghi/forbear", branch = "master" }

This follows master, which always has the features of this documentation. For a fixed version, use tag = "vX.Y.Z" with a release (v1.3.0 or later: older ones have no fpm.toml).

fpm build fetches forbear and FACE. To build and test forbear itself:

git clone https://github.com/szaghi/forbear && cd forbear
fpm test

Install script

From v1.3.0 on, every release ships a tarball and an install.sh, which downloads forbear, fetches FACE with fobis fetch and builds it with FoBiS:

./install.sh --download git --build fobis
./install.sh --download wget --build fobis    # the release tarball