Absoft has announced a new plug-in for Apple's latest development platform, Xcode 3.1. The Absoft add-on lets users program in Fortran within Xcode, via support of the company's special IDE. Both 32- and 64-bit compilers are present, and users additionally have access to Absoft's Fx3 debugger, MRWE framework and third-party libraries. Resulting programs can be composed entirely of Fortran, or a mix of Fortran and C++.

The plug-in is available for free with Absoft's Pro Fortran 10.2 development suite, but the company insists that pure Fortran coding should occur mainly or only within Pro Fortran, due to proprietary supporting features such as a special parallel make utility. Licenses for Pro Fortran start at $699 for a single Mac.