I had never heard of Fortress, but saw this article in InfoWorld about a language demonstration that “will feature implicit parallelism.” When I hear claims like this, my ears perk up. There really isn’t much to be found about Fortress just yet (so if you find anything else, please comment!). It is a project at the Programming Language Research group at Sun funded by DARPA. The Fortress Language Specification (warning - the link is to a PDF) is only in version .903 and I can’t seem to find any downloadable compilers to try it out. So, let’s go over the major points selling point of Fortress:

- General purpose

- Platform independence

- Type safety

- Dynamic Compilation

- Loops are automagically parallel

- Support for mathematical computing - including support for mathematical syntax closer to written notation

Here is a quote from a presentation (argggg PDF warning again) from over a year ago:

“Wherever possible, consider whether a proposed language feature can be provided by a library rather than having it wired into the compiler.”

Okay, that is interesting. My compiler theory is very rusty, so I am not going to take a side one way or another.

Here is some more interesting insight into Guy Steele who is running the Fortress project.  The article actually has a lot of good detail about Fortress.

There is a lot more to go through to get a better understanding - this post was more of a reminder for me to go back and look at Fortress in the future. Hmmmm… Perhaps that 16 CPU Opteron machine is not a bad investment….