Chapel 1.6.0 released

Cray Inc. and the Chapel developer community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.6.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: support for array literals; syntactic improvements to domain literals and zippered iteration; improved support for 'atomic' variables including support for floating point atomics and new methods on all atomic variables; support for pass-by-reference argument intents; a new 'chpldoc' capability for creating documentation from source-based comments; support for using LLVM as a back-end compiler target; support for user overloads of 'op=' and '<=>' assignment operators; support for a strided bulk communication optimization; significant improvements to the SSCA2, RA, and LULESH example codes; and numerous performance improvements and bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES in the release for a more complete list.

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 irregular domains and arrays are currently supported in a 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.