Fortress is developed by Sun.
Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. Fortress features include:
- Implicit parallelism
- Transactions
- Flexible, space-aware, mathematical syntax
- Static type-checking (but with type inference)
- Definition of large parts of the language in its own libraries
Is there anybody that is using it? What are you using it for and why to choose it over more mainstream language?
I don't know of anyone who is using it. I don't assume it has a future accept in math and scientific programming. It reminds me of fortran running on the JVM based on it's description.
Depending on the 'Implicit parallelism' bulleted it could be interesting, but aside from that the future of course remains to be seen.
@Jared's assumption is pretty dead on. It's designed to make scientific computing much easier to do. Currently, to do something meaningful with a challenging computational experiment often requires a computational scientist to resort to difficult to manage solutions like parallel programing with MPI or to using hardware specific languages like CUDA. Fortress will make the computational scientist's life much simpler and will allow for much more code portability than is currently available. It will allow the scientist to write programs using a much more familiar notation than C++, Fortran, or some other legacy language. For example, a sum operator will be available that looks and feels exactly like the sigma used in a mathematical proof. This sum operator will control lower level looping and will be implicitly parallel, taking advantage of whatever multi-processor environment is available.