Dear Chapel community --
Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are proud to announce
the release of Chapel version 1.20!
[Homebrew users: note that 1.20 is not yet available via homebrew, but
hopefully will be soon. If this is a hassle for you, upvote the PR
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/44425
in hopes of moving it along...]
Chapel 1.20 includes the following highlights:
* Chapel's `string` type now supports UTF-8 codepoints rather than
just ASCII characters. In addition, a new `bytes` type with
corresponding literals (e.g., b"here are some bytes") has been added
to support arbitrary byte strings.
* For a class `C`, Chapel now distinguishes between variables that can
store `nil` (using `C?`) and those that cannot (using `C`). A new
postfix `!` operator supports non-nil assertions for nilable `C?`
variables.
* The memory management flavors on classes have been improved so that
an undecorated class type `C` is now generic with respect to memory
management type, where before it was treated as `borrowed C`.
Undecorated `new C()` now defaults to `new owned C()`. Argument
passing has also been improved for managed classes to avoid some
tricky cases.
* Chapel now supports partial instantiations of generic types.
Uninstantiated and partially instantiated generic types can also now
be passed to, or returned from, procedures as type arguments.
* To improve namespace sanity, module-level `use` statements can now
be marked `private` to prevent symbols from becoming visible outside
of the module. In addition, top-level modules must now be `use`d
before their names or contents can be referenced.
* New `list`, `set`, and `map` types have been introduced to support
standard collections with familiar interfaces. Related, list-like
operations on 1D arrays and map-like operations on associative
arrays have been deprecated in favor of these new types.
* Chapel now supports the creation of multi-locale libraries that can
be called from Python or C, as well as the ability to pass or return
strings from exported routines in Chapel libraries.
* A new `UnitTest` module has been added to support unit testing, and
is also available via the mason package manager's `test` command.
* Several new performance optimizations and enhancements have been
made including:
- improved affinity and performance of parallel loops
- optimized bulk transfers for Block-distributed arrays
- compiler-generated unordered operations and improved performance
for unordered operations
- parallel scans on 1D local and block-distributed arrays
- improved performance for parallel-safe data structures
* Improvements to the `mason` package manager in terms of testing,
publishing, searching, and working offline.
* New `Reflection` routines support reasoning about the filename, line
number, module, or function name of a given line of source code.
* The user-facing interfaces for `atomic` types have been improved and
normalized.
* Support for libfabric providers has been improved in terms of
completeness and portability, using the CHPL_COMM=ofi setting.
* A new `none` type with a corresponding `nothing` value is now
supported to avoid the two interpretations of `void` that had
previously existed in Chapel.
* A new `EpochManager` package has been added that supports concurrent
memory reclamation.
* Support for the LLVM compiler back-end has improved.
* We have also improved compiler errors for failures when resolving
functions and for generic routines.
* An initial Chapel module has been created for Cray Shasta systems
and is expected to be available as those systems begin shipping to
customers.
And of course, Chapel 1.20 contains many other feature enhancements,
bug fixes, and documentation improvements. For a far more complete
list of changes including pointers to supporting documentation, please
refer to CHANGES.md within the release or online:
https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.20/CHANGES.md
To download and install the release, see:
https://chapel-lang.org/download.html
And for a list of everyone who contributed to Chapel 1.20, please see:
https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.20/CONTRIBUTORS.md
As always, we're interested in feedback on how we can make the Chapel
language, implementation, libraries, and tools more useful to you.
On behalf of the Chapel project,
-Brad Chamberlain
------------------------------------
For further information about Chapel
------------------------------------
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Our development repository is hosted at GitHub, making it the best
place to track, or contribute to, ongoing Chapel development:
https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel
The Chapel website can be found at:
https://chapel-lang.org
and it remains the best place to find Chapel-related information such
as videos, papers, presentations, blog posts, and tutorials.
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