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If I recall correctly, C and C++ allow some types of pointer aliasing that fortran forbids. If you're reading from one buffer and writing to another, those buffers can overlap in C or C++, but can't in fortran, so a fortran compiler is allowed more leeway with the way instructions are ordered (and maybe elided? Not sure). In compute-intensive workloads, every little bit helps.

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It's also worth noting that although modern C/C++ has the `restrict` keyword, compilers for those languages are generally worse at actually using that information. For example, there's been a long running series of LLVM bugs that has (several times) required Rust to stop emitting that metadata because it would actually miscompile fairly simple vector operations that used `restrict`[1]. I'm hopeful that Flang (the Fortran LLVM compiler) will shake most of those out, since there's a large body of Fortran code that relies on good aliasing optimizations.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/54878

Just C. The various “restrict equivalents” in C++ are non-standard.

Correct. Back in the days, it used to be that you could run Fortran 77 code through f2c and then compile with gcc using the assume-no-aliasing option, and you would get roughly the same performance as if you compiled with f77.

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