Saturday, June 06, 2009

Fortress - Hello World

Here's my early experiment of running Fortress Hello world program, which is listed below (taken from the tutorial at MIT by the Fortress team):

component hello
export Executable

run() = println("Hello, World !")

end


I'm a bit surprised that its compilation time is "really" slow. I may be guessing that it's caused by type inference in the Fortress compiler. JVM 1.6.0_12 was used in the experiment. One of my quick conclusion is that Fortress is not suitable for scripting. But I think its compiled program will not be slow (as I mentioned that I am suspecting its type inference engine that makes scripting slow).

Here's 5 times of running:

chanwit@lb /cygdrive/c/fortress/fortress_3625
$ time `bin/fortress chanwit/hello.fss`
bash: Hello,: command not found

real    0m11.393s
user    0m0.244s
sys     0m0.199s

chanwit@lb /cygdrive/c/fortress/fortress_3625
$ time `bin/fortress chanwit/hello.fss`
bash: Hello,: command not found

real    0m11.486s
user    0m0.181s
sys     0m0.214s

chanwit@lb /cygdrive/c/fortress/fortress_3625
$ time `bin/fortress chanwit/hello.fss`
bash: Hello,: command not found

real    0m11.412s
user    0m0.213s
sys     0m0.215s

chanwit@lb /cygdrive/c/fortress/fortress_3625
$ time `bin/fortress chanwit/hello.fss`
bash: Hello,: command not found

real    0m11.377s
user    0m0.197s
sys     0m0.198s

chanwit@lb /cygdrive/c/fortress/fortress_3625
$ time `bin/fortress chanwit/hello.fss`
bash: Hello,: command not found

real    0m11.432s
user    0m0.229s
sys     0m0.198s


1 comments:

jfklein said...

I doubt it -- there's absolutely nothing for a type inferencing engine to do, because there aren't any variables.

There's more likely a much less interesting explanation, such as that it's just the time to load a huge compiler into memory or other similar system machinery.

BTW, pardon the comments of a total stranger who knows nothing about your blog or what you're trying to accomplish. Your post just popped up under my Google alert for "type inference."