[LLVMdev] Fortress project calls it quits due to lack of a decent VM

[Talin]

I thought this would be of interest to LLVM developers: The Fortress
project, which was an attempt to create a very advanced language with
implicit parallelism, parametric polymorphic types and many other cutting
edge language features, has announced that they are winding down the
project. What I found very interesting was that one of the reasons they
gave was the lack of a suitable execution environment:

"...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). In addressing these
challenges, we learned a lot about the implications of the Fortress type
system for the implementation of symmetric multimethod dispatch, and have
concluded that we are now unlikely to learn more (in a research sense) from
completing the implementation of Fortress for JVM."


(Full article at
https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrapping_up)


This is particularly interesting to me, because in my own work on
experimental languages I've run into many of the same brick walls as they
have.

-- 
-- Talin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20120721/417205a3/attachment.html>