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

[B. Scott Michel]

It's more likely that internal R&D funds are prioritized. Resources are
not infinite. For example, if fixing geospatial indexing in a
distributed cluster needs R&D money, it's more likely to get that
funding than a language with limited adoption prospects.

IIRC, Fortress and Chapel were both funded through the DARPA HPCS
program. HPCS wrapped up a few years ago now. So, the "working with
DARPA" part is only partially factual. I also seem to recall that
Fortress did not survive a down-select in the first phase of HPCS and
that Sun had to go it alone to continue the project.


-scooter

On 7/22/2012 11:22 PM, Gordon Keiser wrote:
>
> One sort of questions why a company the size of Oracle, working with
> DARPA funding, wouldn't have the resources to design the virtual
> machine they required for the project...   although reading the
> article they never do **quite** say that Fortress is being put
> down...       just that the research group is winding down on it, the
> JVM target work isn't going to be completed, and the current open
> source source code will remain open source.   
>
>  
>
> -Gordon
>
>  
>
> *From:*llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu
> [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] *On Behalf Of *Talin
> *Sent:* Saturday, July 21, 2012 1:57 PM
> *To:* LLVM Developers Mailing List
> *Subject:* [LLVMdev] Fortress project calls it quits due to lack of a
> decent VM
>
>  
>
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20120723/831a41c4/attachment.html>