Chapel 1.7.0 released

Cray Inc. and the Chapel developer community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.7.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: support for formatted I/O via readf()/writef() routines; support for associative domain and array literals; support for regular expression operations on strings and channels; support for injecting C declarations into Chapel via 'extern blocks'; a capability for main() to take arguments and return a status value; support for iteration over homogenous tuples; performance improvements related to stack allocating and remote-value-forwarding constant variables; significant improvements to the Chapel version of LULESH; numerous bug fixes; and improvements to semantic checks and error messages. 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.