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Comment by pjmlp

7 years ago

Different goals.

Chapel is a strongly typed language designed from the ground up to replace C++ and Fortran for HPC programming in cluster environments, while removing the typical unsafe features from C and C++.

Initially designed by Cray, Intel has also given an helping hand.

My experience is only from language geek point of view, reading the papers.

Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop 2018 papers

https://chapel-lang.org/CHIUW2018.html

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pjmlp

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m_mueller  7 years ago

> strongly typed language designed from the ground up to replace C++ and Fortran for HPC programming ...

sounds like Julia to me ...

> ... in cluster environments

this is where it may be differentiating itself, AFAIK Julia has not been very focused on clustering from start, but I'm assuming it's now getting better.

  • ChrisRackauckas  7 years ago

    Julia works great on clusters, I use it all the time. It's learning a lot from Chapel too. Chapel has an amazing parallelism model, and a lot of Julia's parallelism is learning from it, including the near future hierarchical task-based multithreading. Julia was designed for interactive usage that can generate fast code, while Chapel was designed for the more traditional HPC usage. With more and more people using interactive languages on the HPC to avoid the translation step of the two-language problem though, Julia seems to be eating into the domain where more hardcore people used to write C++ and Fortran with MPI (I was one of those for a bit!). But while "no need to rewrite code, just take your interactive script and throw it on the cluster" is right for some, other applications will want a statically compiled language with a strong parallelism model which is Chapel.

    The issue I see with Chapel though is that HPC is such a small community compared to larger scientific computing, and Julia has such a good design that it is very easy to improve (using Julia code!) with a large developer group (currently 736 contributors, that is quite a bit more than CPython has ever had and Julia is a lot younger), Julia is a lot more nimble. So when Chapel gets a good idea, sure enough there's an MIT programming languages or HPC fellow who proposes it in Julia, and so you get stuff like https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/22631 soon after. That doesn't mean Chapel is bad, but Julia already has the largest contributor base of any of the open source scientific computing languages still being developed, and that manpower is definitely useful for keeping up with the current research trends (working on Julia is a good way to get a math/CS PhD at MIT :) )

  • pjmlp  7 years ago

    Hasn't Julia focus been MATLAB folks mostly?

    In any case, the more the merrier. :)