Announcing Chapel version 1.18.0!

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

Hi Chapel community --

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are proud to announce
the release of Chapel version 1.18!  This release includes the
following highlights:

* classes now support multiple flavors of lifetime management, where
   the default has changed from 'unmanaged' (user must delete) to
   'borrowed' (objects will be auto-freed at the end of their scope);
   other options include 'owned' and 'shared', which support ownership
   transfers and reference counting, respectively

* a new compile-time lifetime checker helps guard against referring
   to previously freed class objects

* Chapel's package manager, 'mason' now supports external dependencies
   for both system- and 'Spack'-managed packages; 'mason' also now
   supports the ability to test packages and add examples to them

* loop expressions and promoted calls over domains and arrays now
   preserve the shape and index set of the leading expression

* forall loops now support task-private variables

* all records and classes now use initializers by default, and
   constructors have been deprecated due to the increased power and
   flexibility of initializers

* child classes that want to override ancestor class methods must now
   use the 'override' keyword to do so, as a means of guarding against
   common errors

* enumerated types are now purer with respect to casts, coercions, and
   underlying integer values; users can also now declare ranges, domains,
   and arrays whose indices are enum values (e.g., red..violet)

* initial support has been added for UTF-8 strings

* new 'HDF5' and 'NetCDF' package modules have been added for reading
   data from files in those formats

* the 'LinearAlgebra' module has improved in terms of both performance
   and usability

* new buffered versions of the non-fetching atomic operations are
   available, which can lead to performance improvements on Cray systems

* 'sync' variables and parallel I/O have been optimized when using
   'qthreads' tasking

* large data transfers, non-fetching atomics, and on-clauses have all
   been optimized for Cray systems

* task stacks have been improved in terms of memory utilization and
   reduced fragmentation

* Chapel's support for creating libraries that can be called from C or
   Python has improved significantly

* Chapel's support for ARM systems has improved

* new scripts are now provided to help build and maintain Chapel
   configurations

* compilation time has been reduced for most programs

And of course, Chapel 1.18 contains a very large number of other
feature enhancements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements.  For
a far more complete list of its changes including pointers to related
documentation, please refer to CHANGES.md within the release or
online:

   https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.18/CHANGES.md

To download and install the release, see:

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

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

   https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/1.18/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 project,
-Brad Chamberlain


------------------------------------
For further information about Chapel
------------------------------------

Whether you're a devoted Facebook or Twitter user, or might simply enjoy 
checking in on us from time-to-time, our project's social media pages have 
a steady stream of content about the project and language:

    https://www.facebook.com/ChapelLanguage
    https://twitter.com/ChapelLanguage
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHmm27bYjhknK5mU7ZzPGsQ/

Our development repository is hosted at GitHub, making it the best
place to track or contribute to ongoing Chapel development:

    https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel

Our main project page is located at:

    https://chapel-lang.org

and it remains the best place to find Chapel-related information such
as videos, papers, presentations, blog posts, tutorials, and the like.