Oracle winds down Fortress programming language

Oracle researchers are “winding down” development of the Fortress programming language for high-performance computing, an effort started nearly 10 years ago by Sun Microsystems, says PC World.

Fortress was meant to provide a superior alternative to the well-established Fortran language for HPC. It is also among a number of languages that received financial support from the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency High Productivity Computing Systems programme.

“Ten years is a remarkably long run for an industrial research project (one to three years is much more typical), but we feel that our extended effort has been worthwhile,” well-known computer scientist and Fortress project architect Guy Steele said in a blog post, according to Computer World.

“Many aspects of the Fortress design were novel, and we learned a great deal from building an interpreter and an initial set of libraries.”

However, the project faced “severe technical challenges” during the past few years, according to Steele. The issues revolved around "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 [the Java VM]," he wrote.