Oracle lowers the flag on Fortress language project

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/23/oracle_fortress_project_halted/

by protomyth • 14 years ago

55 25 14 years ago

theregister.co.uk

mindcrime3• 14 years ago

Bummer, I was really interested in Fortress. There really seemed to be some interesting stuff going on there. Ah well, maybe some of the research will help with Java or something else down the road.

Or, perhaps some plucky startup will pick up the technology and next week we'll see a headline "Startup raises $4M to develop Fortress" or something of that ilk.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

> "Startup raises $4M to develop Fortress"

Nope.

Ralith6• 14 years ago

VCs are interested in spending millions on programming language R&D? Where do I sign up?

mindcrime3• 14 years ago

Well, Greylock invested[1][2] in Typesafe, the company backing Scala.

[1] http://greylockvc.com/2011/05/12/why-we-invested-in-typesafe...

[2] http://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-professor-launches-typesafe-wi...

Ralith6• 14 years ago

Interesting that the challenge they felt particularly worth calling out wasn't about solving hard algorithms or design problems, but rather making those solutions function on the limited JVM platform. Perhaps this will give pause to the next language developer tempted to target the JVM for no reason other than its popularity.

mindcrime3• 14 years ago

From Guy Steele's blog post[1]:

"Nevertheless, over the last few years, as we have focused on implementing a compiler targeted to the Java Virtual Machine, we encountered some severe technical challenges having to do with the mismatch between the (rather ambitious) Fortress type system and a virtual machine not designed to support it (that would be every currently available VM, not just JVM)."

So it doesn't sound like this is any particular indictment of the JVM.

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrap...

scott_s• 14 years ago

They published a paper on it last year, "Type-checking Modular Multiple Dispatch with Parametric Polymorphism and Multiple Inheritance": http://www.mpi-sws.org/~skilpat/papers/multipoly.pdf (LtU discussion: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4236)

mariusmg• 14 years ago

If you're doing an "ambitious" type system, you might as well do your own VM. Trying to shoehorn stuff into jvm/clr/parrot/whatever is hardly ideal.

Ralith6• 14 years ago

An indictment of VMs in general, then. They're almost universally targeted at supporting a particular language, and cause problems when more advanced concepts (such as cutting-edge type systems) must be implemented.

felipemnoa• 14 years ago

I do wonder what about the JVM makes it harder as opposed to using any other platform? Would it have been easier on Javascript or Ruby?

Ralith6• 14 years ago

It's not about the language their implementation is written in (although many people find MLs and Lisps to make compilers and interpreters much easier to implement), it's about the machine that their implementation targets. The JVM imposes many restrictions on and makes many assumptions about the behavior of client languages as a direct result from being built to host Java. I have no doubt that the CLR is similar. Javascript and Ruby are not typically compilation targets, bar things like ClojureScript.

bascule3• 14 years ago

I'm curious if the impedance mismatch Guy Steele describes between Fortress's type system and the JVM could be remedied by InvokeDynamic. Unfortunately he didn't mention anything about it in his blog post.

dkd• 14 years ago

AFAIK, Guy Steele is in this project. What'll happen to him?

tjr• 14 years ago

If you click on through you can see Guy's blog post that this article is based on: https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrap...

He seems to imply that he'll be moving on to some other project at Oracle, but it's not really stated explicitly.

m0nastic• 14 years ago

Presumably, he'll continue to head the Oracle Labs Programming Language Research Group (which most likely is doing more than just researching Fortress).

Although maybe the decision will be related to him going somewhere else (I'd imagine there's a lot of places that would fall all over themselves to hire Steele).

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

I hope he moves on to a better company. :) The guy is legend. It's hard to find much good to say about Oracle these days.

caycep• 14 years ago

i thought for a moment Oracle was going after Dwarf Fortress...

kabdib• 14 years ago

Yeah, for tips on how to improve their user interfaces. :-)

jkbyc• 14 years ago

Too bad for Quora: https://twitter.com/benjamn/status/74191660543778816

> Ben Newman ‏@benjamn

> @yaaang Your sources are stale. We evaluated Scala, yes,

> but we are now 90% committed to Fortress, a modern dialect

> of FORTRAN.

rwmj• 14 years ago

Why? Fortress is open source (BSD-licensed). It'll continue to be available forever and as long as anyone is using it and interested it'll keep getting fixes and features.

Oracle lowers the flag on Fortress language project

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