Fully integrating the Flang Fortran compiler with standard MLIR

Fortran is the lingua franca of HPC code development and as such it is crucial that we as a community have open source Fortran compilers capable of generating high performance executables. Flang is LLVM's Fortran compiler and leverages MLIR which is a reusable compiler infrastructure which, as part of LLVM, has become popular in recent years.
However, whilst Flang leverages MLIR it does not fully integrate with it and instead provides bespoke translation and optimisation passes to target LLVM-IR. In this paper we first explore the performance of Flang against other compilers popular in HPC for a range of benchmarks before describing a mapping between Fortran and standard MLIR, exploring the performance of this. The result of this work is an up to three times speed up compared with Flang's existing approach across the benchmarks and experiments run, demonstrating that the Flang community should seriously consider leveraging standard MLIR.