Announcing Chapel version 1.16!

[Brad C. <br...@cr...>]

Hi Chapel users, developers, and educators --

[Apologies if this is your second copy of this announcement.  It appears 
that the chapel-announce mailing list no longer automatically mails to 
chapel-users, -developers, and -education, so I'm doing it manually...]

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are proud to announce
the release of Chapel version 1.16!  This release includes the
following highlights:

* an initial version of Mason, Chapel's package manager (written in Chapel!)

* a new 'c2chapel' tool, useful for converting C header files into Chapel
   'extern' declarations to help simplify interoperability

* significant improvements in error-handling support, including the ability
   to throw errors across tasks and locales

* a new 'defer' statement to help with cleaning up resources regardless of
   control flow

* improved 'reduce' intent semantics that fold in the variable's initial value

* a number of standard library and package module improvements, including:
   - a new 'Crypto' module based on OpenSSL
   - new 'Collection' modules, 'DistributedBag' and 'DistributedDeque'
   - distributed guided and dynamic iterators that partition work across locales
   - improved support for mixing MPI with ugni, gasnet/aries, and/or qthreads
   - ongoing improvements to the 'LinearAlgebra' module

* significant performance improvements due to:
   - locality tuning of distributed sparse domains and arrays
   - serializing records across locales to cache them and avoid communication
   - improved NUMA locality for 'ugni' by dynamically registering arrays
   - better integration with the LLVM back-end, enabling its optimizations
   - reduced locking in associative array accesses

* other improvements include:
   - generalization of the CSR layout to also include CSC storage
   - improved behavior and features for the 'Replicated' distribution
   - interoperability improvements for those working with C pointers and memory

And of course, Chapel 1.16 contains a very large number of other
feature enhancements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements.  To
see a far more complete list of its changes, refer to CHANGES.md
within the release or online:

   https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.16/CHANGES.md

To download and install the release, see:

    http://chapel.cray.com/download.html

For a list of those who contributed to the release, refer to:

   https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.16/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 development team,
-Brad Chamberlain


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