Now this is something to look forward to. I just hope an implementation
that doesn't rely on the JVM comes out soon. :-)
Sent to you by Dean via Google Reader: Fortress: A Fortran Killer? via
DrDobbs Portal Blog by jerickso on 5/12/08
Of all the cool stuff at Sun's recent JavaOne conference, Fortress has
to be near the top. Not that Fortress is brand new; it was announced by
Sun Labs more than a year ago and Guy Steele Jr. mentioned it in a Dr.
Dobb's interview before that. But this was Fortress's official
coming-out party, with the first reference implementation of a Fortress
interpreter shipping just last month and a compiler due out before long.
So what is Fortress? It's a programming language for high-performance
computing (HPC) that features implicit parallelism, transactions,
mathematical syntax, and static checking. Guy Steele has said that
Fortress represented the "future of extreme parallelism," something
that's more relevant today than ever before. Steele also said--and this
was echoed at JavaOne--that "Fortress is doing for Fortran what Java
did for C/C++."
In addition to its support for multi-core processors and parallelism,
Fortress has a number of interesting features. For instance, it lets
you program directly in mathematical notation. Because it incorporates
a mathematical syntax, math operations look the same in code as in a
math text. Units of measurements are types and it supports functional
programming. Fortress also supports Eiffel-like contracts, multiple
inheritance, and--did I mention?--parallelization and multi-core
platforms.
All in all, Fortress seems like the right tool emerging at the right
time.
-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@???
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