History

Origin of Metalquicha

Met’al q’uicha (the Huastec (tenek) word for sunflower), originated as a “I need to write this code for an invited talk at Pacifichem” throughout the year 2025. Metalquicha depends on a personal hobby project of mine, called pic, which is a Fortran library that resembles a standard library, like the STL from C/C++.

The pic library provides data structures, algorithms, and utilities that make development in Metalquicha easier and faster. Alongisde with pic, Metalquicha also uses pic to provide access to MPI and BLAS functionalities through pic mpi and pic blas.

The main idea behind Metalquicha (and its associated presentation at Pacifichem) was to show that Fortran can be used as a modern programming language, with the ability to do rapid prototyping, and the development of complex quanutm chemistry software. Most of the development was spent writing the pic libraries, Metalquicha was mostly a side projecto to showcase the capabilities applied to quanutm chemistry.

However, after the presentation at Pacifichem, I had some personal leave and time to polish the code and add more features. I think it might be a useful program for the community, so I decided to make things nice and add some documentation for maybe some users to try it out.

This is a purely hobby project, so as long as I am not on leave (most of the time) I only work on this on my off time and weekends, so please be patient with bug fixes and new features.