C pointers to multi-dimensional assumed shape Fortran arrays with gfortran

Interoperability between C and Fortran codes is often complicated by Fortran’s support for “true” multi-dimensional arrays. In addition, Fortran 90 supports assumed shape (also referred to as deferred shape) arrays, where the extent sizes are determined at runtime. Actual arguments for array dummy arguments can be array slices that may be of non-unit stride. In short, an assumed size Fortran array can reference non-contiguous chunks of memory.

Therefore, the compiler will reject an attempt to obtain a raw data pointer of a Fortran array to pass to a C function like in the following module:

gfortran 4.7 emits the following error message:

Error: Assumed-shape array 'v' at (1) cannot be an argument to the procedure 'c_loc' because it is not C interoperable

What if you know that the assumed-shaped array passed to your function is actually contiguous (or you choose to leave it the caller’s responsibility)? Surely the compiler should be able to give you a pointer to the first array element like so:

Turns out gfortran doesn’t and generates the same error as before. The gfortran developers have recognized this as a bug, which will be fixed in the 4.9 release.

In the meantime you can work around it by defining a pure function that simply returns the first argument of an assumed shape array. gfortran is happy with that since now the type of the argument passed to c_loc is a scalar and therefore interoperable:

However, this workaround confuses Intel’s and PGI’s Fortran compilers, so simply escape it using the a preprocessor #define: