chapel VS ponyc

Thanks, @subharmonicon!

While Chapel can run on many different systems, the main goal is making HPC programming much easier. Therefore, we are currently focusing on hardware that you can find in HPC systems (NVIDIA, AMD and Intel). Metal doesn't fall into that category, unfortunately. So far, the name came up infrequently in our discussions IIRC (especially targetting SPIRV), but we haven't heard from any [potential] user who may be interested in it. I would encourage you or anybody else interested in it to create an issue asking for the feature: https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/new. Seeing public interest in that direction can change our prioritization.

One thing that I wanted to add that's not in the blogpost is the "cpu-as-device" mode. With that mode, you can use any machine, even one without a GPU, to write applications using Chapel's GPU features. That mode is for those who want to do initial development/debugging on their personal laptops before putting their application on an HPC system. In other words, while you can't use Metal directly, you can still write GPU-enabled applications in your Mac using Chapel, if the end goal is to run it on an HPC system. More details on cpu-as-device: https://chapel-lang.org/docs/main/technotes/gpu.html#cpu-as-...

Agreed. Here is a serious contender[0] minus all the hype and the $100M in VC money. You would expect a minimum of interest given how Mojo is received by the community, but not really in practice.

[0]: https://chapel-lang.org/

Cray is pushing their own language as well, Chapel.

https://chapel-lang.org/

As for Julia on Cray,

"Julia — The Newest Petaflop Family Language We Have Started to Love"

https://www.avenga.com/magazine/julia-programming-language

> Julia is one of the few languages that are in the so-called PetaFlop family; the other languages are C, C++ and Fortrant. It achieved 1.54 petaflops with 1.3 million threads on the Cray XC40 supercomputer.

https://chapel-lang.org if possible, Nix was also recently mentioned in Chapel Workshop https://chapel-lang.org/CHIUW2023.html https://github.com/twesterhout/nix-chapel

See Val for a possible step into that direction.

https://www.val-lang.dev/

Or how the Chapel language for HPC is going at it,

https://chapel-lang.org/

I suggest posting to a PLT focused resource, such as http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

That said, a bit confused about the languages you reference in this context (Python, C#, JS) - didn't see any mention here or at your github repo of languages (some relatively ancient) in this space designed.

Sandia: Programming Languages for HPC [high performance computing] - is there life after MPI?

https://www.sandia.gov/app/uploads/sites/179/2022/04/SOS10-T...

Chapel:

https://chapel-lang.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Array_programming_lan...

We needed the implicit conversion to `uint` in order for the overload resolution rules to make reasonable choices when faced with binary overloads for all of the numeric types. The document I linked talks through the examples. The case we were facing is something that we shared with `C#` -- in `C#` terms, if I make overloads for `f` for all numeric types (see https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/main/test/types/coerce/allNumericsBinary.cs if you want to know exactly what I am talking about), then `f( myInt, myUlong )` runs `f(float, float)` which makes no sense. Especially if you care about numerical accuracy or program performance.

Code | Blog Walkthrough

For example, the actor's model is not used by a lot of languages, Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/) and Elixir are the only ones that I know, but they address the concurrency problem quite well, while it's a pain to deal with in other languages at large scale.

And that last point is critical. If the language flatly can't represent some concepts it uses, they have to be implemented somewhere else. I had a similar discussion with a proponent for Pony once- the language itself is 100% safe, and fully dependent on C for its runtime and data structures. One of Rust's core strengths is being able to express unsafe concepts, meaning the unsafe code can expose a safe interface that accurately describes its requirements rather than an opaque C ABI. Vale doesn't seem to do that.

"Exterior iteration. Iteration used to be by stack / non-escaping coroutines, which we also called "interior" iteration, as opposed to "exterior" iteration by pointer-like things that live in variables you advance. Such coroutines are now finally supported by LLVM (they weren't at the time) and are actually a fairly old and reliable mechanism for a linking-friendly, not-having-to-inline-tons-of-library-code abstraction for iteration. They're in, like, BLISS and Modula-2 and such. Really normal thing to have, early Rust had them, and they got ripped out for a bunch of reasons that, again, mostly just form "an argument I lost" rather than anything I disagree with today. I wish Rust still had them. Maybe someday it will!"

I remember that one. The change was shortly after I started fooling with Rust and was major. Major as in it broke all the code that I'd written to that point.

"Async/await. I wanted a standard green-thread runtime with growable stacks -- essentially just "coroutines that escape, when you need them too"."

I remember that one, too; it was one of the things that drew me to the language---I was imagining something more like Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/).

"The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got."

Almost certainly true. But The Rust We Got is A Better C++, which was never appealing to me because I never liked C++ anyway.

Pony or bust.

If you have a value in mutable storage, and want to treat it as an immutable parameter without copying it first, you will need to provide some way to guarantee that it won't be mutated while being treated as immutable! There doesn't seem to be a definitive best way to do that (although the likes of Pony make a try at it).

The love child of Erlang and Rust exists already: Pony.

https://www.ponylang.io

It really is the best of both languages... unfortunately, the main supporter of Pony seems to have stopped using it in favour of Rust though :D.

But if that's really what you want, Pony is your language. It definitely deserves more love.

You can actually try to have a magic language which "does not ignore decades of PL research" but you are likely to get either something broken or a project that is likely not going to release in our lifetime.

Never a bad time to plug Pony lang[1] - a safety-oriented actor-model language. In addition to the numerous safety guarantees, you also get a beautiful syntax and automatic memory management. Really a great language that often gets overshadowed by Rust's hype-turfing.

[1]: https://www.ponylang.io/