Chapel 1.3.0 released

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.0 of the Cray Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: Initial support for a Replicated distribution and improved support for the Block-Cyclic distribution; a major reworking of the semantics and implementation of ranges; initial support for volatile bool, int, uint, real, and imag types; support for extern consts and classes; extensive improvements to the sample codes in $CHPL_HOME/examples; significant updates to the language specification; as well as numerous feature improvements and bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES for a more complete list of changes.

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.