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Sun Releases Fortran Replacement as OSS
sproketboy writes "Sun Microsystems has released an alpha version of a new programming language called Fortress to eventually replace Fortran for high performance scientific computing tasks. Fortress was designed specifically for multi-core processors and is published under the BSD license."
This one looks like a winner.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Robert O'Callahan (a core Mozilla developer) had some fairly insightful comments on Fortress a couple of days ago I personally found interesting...
Multi-processor programming is becoming a real force / nightmare. Dual-core is only the beginning. At the rate AMD and Intel are moving, we will have Niagara like chips in our home PCs. Already, AMD and Intel have quad-core processors, and are talking about dual quad core (8 core) computers. The average program just can't scale well to 8 cores. Most programs, programming languages, and algorithms don't scale well with increasing the number of cores.
Fortress is proposing a language to automate that scaling. They are discussing language features to deal with multi-CPU systems, where multiple memory banks are present. AMD's multi-CPU system's (Opteron) with HyperTransport each have a separate memory banks for each processor. It makes sense to allocate the half of the array used by CPU #1 in CPU #1's memory bank, and the other half used by CPU #2 in CPU #2's memory bank. Then the threads should be split so first pair of cores on CPU #1 work in the first half of the array, and the second pair of cores on CPU #2 work on the activities related to CPU #2. Currently, all these multi-processor mapping activities happens manually, and it really sucks. It would be wonderful if programming languages supported this activity automatically.
I don't know if Fortress is the answer to the multi-core / multi-CPU problem. I hope something is. The computing world needs a solution.
Folks,
Seriously, first go and read about it before making any comments or cracking FORTRAN jokes.
This language is unfortunately advertised as "FORTRAN replacement" though probably the only thing it shares with FORTRAN is that it is targetted at scientific computing. But that's about it!
Secondly, there is a different between language specification and implementation! The "interpreter" is just proof of concept and a fast way of giving means to people to play with it so that you can ot just try to express your computation in it, but also see it running in flesh! Though, it is primarily of interest to language designers to find out implementation quirks and iron them out as the language design evolves. A compiler is usually the final outcome, but is not the goal. The goal of language design is to address the problems in the domain it is targetted to, effectively.
I have been following the developments in Fortress community for a while and it is a very peculiar one in its own regard. Guy Steele has bettered himself again and has set some of the firsts-
1. Integration with typography system. The programs are not just typed, but typed well. You can typeset your equations. The primary symbol set is unicode (with ASCII symbols for lagacy compatibility).
2. Full support for closures, mixins etc with multi-paradigm programming support.
3. The language specification implies parallelism by default! loops are parallel, unless specified serial.
4. Units are included in the language type system. So the compiler can not just check whether you're using the right storage type (int, real etc), but also whether the calculation you're coding actually makes sense!
and many more. It is a great read for anyone remotely interested in computing, languages and software enginnering and development.
Please follow the links to the specification down in this thread and go through it, if your busy schedule permits.
Thanks
- mritunjai