Chapel 2.0 Release: Chapel team announces the release of version 2.0 after years of work. It's a stable language with backwards-compatible features, enabling fast and scalable software development for various applications.

• Notable Improvements: Along with usability and performance enhancements, it brings stability, allowing confident code writing on different hardware.

What People Are Doing With Chapel:

• Arkouda: An open-source data science library in Chapel for interactive analysis of massive datasets. It scales easily on HPE Cray EX with Slingshot-11 network, achieving high throughput.
• CHAMPS: A software framework for computational fluid dynamics written in Chapel. It's the largest project in the language, reducing code size and improving on predecessors with distributed memory and multi-physics simulations.
• Coral Biodiversity Computation: Scott Bachman used Chapel for coral reef biodiversity analysis. It achieved a significant performance improvement over Matlab, distributed across nodes and GPUs, and highlighted Chapel's portability.

A Language Built for Scalable Parallel Computing:

• Features like forall loops and on statements allow seamless adaptation to different parallel hardware. For example, changing a for loop to a forall enables parallel execution on multiple CPU cores, and adding an on statement enables GPU execution.
• Other features include sync variables, coforall loops, reductions, and promotion for various parallel programming needs.

Rich Tooling Support:

• The 2.0 release brings a Visual Studio Code extension with features like code diagnostics, documentation on hover, go-to-definition, and linting using chplcheck.
• The Chapel language server can be used from other editors too, providing much functionality.

Conclusion and Looking Forward: Chapel has supported developers for nearly 10 years. The 2.0 release is a culmination of efforts, and the language will continue to improve.

• Ways to Try Chapel: GitHub Codespaces (with pre-configured Chapel development environment), Homebrew (install with brew install chapel), and Docker (pull chapel/chapel image).
• Examples in GitHub Codespaces include a hello.chpl file that can be compiled and run with simple commands. Docker images like chapel/chapel and chapel/chapel-gasnet offer different execution options.