We’re happy to report that Chapel 2.9 has been released today! This new version of Chapel continues the project’s goals of making scalable parallel programming more productive, accessible, and portable.
Highlights of Chapel 2.9
Version 2.9 of Chapel includes the following highlights, which address a number of user requests while also continuing with the project’s recent focus on improving Chapel’s tools ecosystem:
- Dynamically loaded Chapel libraries
While previous releases have supported dynamic loading of libraries written in C or supporting C-like capabilities, Chapel 2.9 includes initial support for dynamically loading libraries written in Chapel that make use of the language’s distributed parallelism and global namespace. - Mason package manager
We’ve continued our recent focus on Chapel’s package manager, Mason, improving its usability and flexibility. Since Chapel 2.8, we’ve also published a number of new Mason modules supporting Parquet IO, OpenSSL-based cryptography, Vectorization, Base64 strings, Logging, and more. For this release, we’ve also launched a web-based browser for Mason packages, available at https://chapel-lang.org/packages/ - Enhanced Editing and Tools
In addition to Mason, Chapel 2.9 includes significant improvements to the experience of writing Chapel code in editors like VSCode through its language server (CLS) and linter. Specific areas of improvement include new and improved overlays as well as improved views of generic routines. Outside of the editing experience, we’ve improved ‘chpldoc’ for code-based documentation, ‘c2chapel’ for interoperating with C, and ‘chapel-py’ for making queries of the Chapel compiler. - User-Requested Features
In addition to the features above, Chapel 2.9 includes a number of other features requested by users, such as improved support for ‘union’ types and parallelization of scans over array-like expressions. We’ve also extended our release formats to include RPMs for users on HPE Cray EX systems running RHEL. Finally, Chapel 2.9 includes several bug fixes for user-reported issues. - Support for LLVM / LLDB 22 and CUDA 13
This release upgrades Chapel’s back-end and debugging capabilities to support version 22 of LLVM and LLDB. In addition to keeping us up-to-date with these latest versions, this also enabled us to add support for CUDA 13.
Learn More
For further details on the highlights above, or the many other improvements in Chapel 2.9 not covered here, see the official Chapel 2.9 announcement on the Chapel project blog.