Oracle lowers the flag on Fortress language project
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
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...
With InDy, the JVM can do a one-time check, verifying whatever security invariants the language has put in place, and after that, the MethodHandle is in InDy's polymorphic inline cache and the security checks can be skipped on subsequent calls. All subsequent calls dispatch at Java speed and can be inlined by HotSpot just like any other Java method.
Writing your compiler on top of the JVM using InDy might help make this clearer!
Perhaps of just the current VM's, and not some intrinsic limitation of VM's in general.
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.
Nope.
[1]: http://greylockvc.com/2011/05/12/why-we-invested-in-typesafe...
[2]: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-professor-launches-typesafe-wi...
> 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.
He seems to imply that he'll be moving on to some other project at Oracle, but it's not really stated explicitly.
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).