Chapel 1.2.0 released

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: support for parallel iteration over sparse and associative domains and arrays; support for config types and more general config param expressions; initial support for first-class and anonymous functions; expanded support for declaring external C functions, types, and variables; support for the Cray XE6 (TM) and the Cray CX1000 (TM); improvements to the language specification and documentation; and a number of bug fixes.

This release of Chapel contains stable support for the base language, and for task and regular data parallelism using one or more locales. Data parallel operations on sparse and associative domains and arrays are currently supported in a single-locale implementation. Data parallel operations on opaque domains and arrays are currently only supported in a single-threaded, single-locale implementation. While performance has received a great deal of attention in Chapel's design, this release lacks a number of crucial performance optimizations and is not suitable for in-depth performance comparisons and studies.