Fortress- Sun's Love for Open Source

Filed in archive Application Development on January 15, 2007

Sun's love for open source is much more evident now as it attempts to create Fortress, a brand new programming language. Remember FORTRAN, the language which was developed by IBM five decades ago and still being used for high performance computing task? Sun foresees Fortress as a modern replacement for Fortran.

Just recently Sun has unveiled prototype Fortress interpreter as open source software aimed at executing Fortress programs line by line. This language can tackle mainstream computing challenge quite easily and extract work from new processing engine appearing in multi core processors. Storing data in an intelligent manner can too be handled by Fortress. Extracting parallelism from workloads was a tough nut to crack up till now but Fortress is expected to take care of that problem.

The success of this language would not depend upon the brand name of Sun but upon the number of developers the language is able to attract. Let's keep our fingers cross.