Give the target attribute to a variable, just in case we need to point at them, in Fortran

I have a code that makes extensive use of a type, let say, for simplicity:

type, public :: my_type
    real, allocatable, dimension(:)     :: x
    real, allocatable, dimension(:,:)   :: coeffs
end type my_type
...
type(my_type) :: data

Later in the code, we need to write data%x and data%coeffs to a file. Whether the user wants it or not, this file could be written in a standard unformatted binary file and recently we add the possibility to write the file in HDF5 format.

In this case, when creating the data sets for data%x or data%coeffs, I need to pass a pointer, pointing on them, as argument to some hdf5 subroutines. This pointer can be defined as follow:

f_ptr = c_loc( data%x(1) )

But to do that, I should have given the target attribute to x and coeffs in my_type definition.

My questions are then:

is it safe to give this target attribute, just in case, even if, in the end, the user does not want to use HDF5 format ?
Would it have an impact on performance ?
Would it be better to make, in the routine that writes the data, a local copy of data%x and data%coeffs to same shape arrays with the target attribute and then point at them and pass the pointer to hdf5 subroutines ?

If it helps, this code can be compiled either with gfortran or ifort.

Thanks in advance !

Solution

It is safe; maybe; there's no need to make a copy.

Typically you would pass data%x (and then data%coeffs) to a procedure that does the HDF5 dataset writing as a actual argument, say associated with a dummy array arg. If so, just give arg the TARGET attribute.

call write_array_to_hdf5_file(data%x, ...)

subroutine write_array_to_hdf5_file(arg, ...)
  real, intent(in), target :: arg(:)
  ...
  call h5d_write_f(..., c_loc(arg))

If the actual argument does not have the target attribute, then pointers associated with arg become undefined when the write_array_to_hdf5_file procedure finishes execution.