Comment by yubblegum

7 months ago

Chapel got a mention in the 'Related Work' section. I looked at it a few years ago and found it compelling (but I don't do HPC so it was just window watching). What's the HN feedback on Chapel?

https://chapel-lang.org/

5 comments

yubblegum

Reply
bradcray  7 months ago

@yubblegum: I'm unfairly biased towards Chapel (positively), so won't try to characterize HN's opinion on it. But I did want to note that while Chapel's original and main reason for being is HPC, now that everyone lives in a parallel-computing world, users also benefits from using Chapel in desktop environments where they want to do multicore and/or GPU programming. One such example is covered in this interview with an atmospheric science researcher for whom it has replaced Python as his go-to desktop language: https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/7qs-dias/

  • yubblegum  7 months ago

    Thank you Brad! I was in fact wondering about GPU use myself. Does it work with Apple's M# GPUs?

    Btw, I was looking at the docs for GPU [1] and unsolicited feedback from a potential user is that the setup process needs to become less painful. For example, yesterday installed it via brew but then hit the setup page for GPU and noted I now needed to build from source.

    (Back in the day, one reason some of Sun's Java efforts to extend Java's fieddom faltered was because of the friction of setup for (iirc) things like Applets, etc. I think Chapel deserves a far wider audiance.)

    [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39032481

    • bradcray  7 months ago

      @yubblegum: I'm afraid we don't have an update on support for Apple GPUs since last year's comment. While it comes up from time-to-time, nobody has opened an issue for it yet (please feel encouraged to!), and it isn't something we've had the chance to prioritize, where a lot of our recent work has focused on improving tooling support and addressing user requests.

      I'll take your feedback about simplifying GPU-based installs back to our team, and have noted it on this thematically related issue: https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/25187#issuecomm...

throwaway17_17  7 months ago

Chapel and Lustre (a parallel, distributed file system) from Cray were funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program. This work, along with Fortress, from Sun, were developed explicitly to enable and ‘simplify’ the programming of distributed “supercomputers”. The work and artifacts, along with the published documentation and research is of particularly high quality.

Even if you aren’t involved in HPC I’d say the concepts transfer or provide a great basis for parallel and distributed idioms and methodologies that can be adapted to existing languages or used in development of new languages.

TL;DR - Chapel is cool and if you are interested in the general subject matter (despite a different focus) Fortress, which is discontinued, should also be checked out.