We’re pleased to report the release of Chapel 2.8 today! This new version of Chapel continues the project’s goals of making parallel programming more productive, accessible, and portable.
Highlights of Chapel 2.8
Version 2.8 of Chapel includes the following highlights, which continue the project’s recent focus on improving Chapel’s tools ecosystem, while also including some notable portability improvements:
- Editor enhancements
Reading and writing Chapel code using editors like VSCode is easier than ever thanks to enhancements in Chapel’s language server (CLS) and linter (chplcheck). The improvements in this release are due to improved awareness of the complete source code of a user’s project, better integrations of error messages, and other ergonomic improvements in terms of inlays, formatting, and syntax rules. - Improved debugging
Debugging Chapel programs in LLDB has improved via support for evaluating C++-like calls and expressions in addition to support for pretty-printing standard container types and distributed arrays. - Package management via Mason
Chapel’s package manager, Mason, is significantly improved in this release in terms of the flexibility and robustness of its features, along with revamped documentation. - Portability Enhancements
Chapel 2.8 includes lightweight tasking support for RISC-V processors via Sandia National Laboratories’ Qthreads version 1.23. It also includes improved support for AMD GPUs using ROCm versions 6.3 and 7 - Flexibility for Slurm Users
A new ‘–system-launcher-flags’ option is supported for Chapel-generated executables on Slurm-managed systems, giving users the ability to pass additional options to the underlying commands that are used to launch the Chapel program.
Learn More
For further details on the highlights above, or other improvements in Chapel 2.8, see the official Chapel 2.8 announcement on the Chapel project blog.