chapel VS swift-corelibs-foundation

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

a : https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...

I wouldn't want to be the guy relying on this table advancement for this project. The fact that they're rewriting it in pure swift probably says a lot about the quality of the current approach.

b: makes absolutely no difference from a developer perspective. if you want to run threads in swift you're going to use gcd.

c: my take with all apple software tech has been to wait until they've dogfooded their own tech long enough to make it useable. Worked very well for me so far, thank you very much.

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation

There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything:

  https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

The (shitty) old Linux implementation has been on GitHub for years.

Sigh... The traditional argument is that every dependency is of the same quality and trustworthiness of the language Standard Library.

If I use the SL, then I should also have no problem using some lashed-up chimera that has a dependency hierarchy that spans three continents.

Like I said, I'll do things my way.

For the record, here's a peek at some of the "worthless" packages that I use in my own work: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware

Also, for the record, here's the Swift Foundation Library: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

It has plenty of open issues: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/issues

If every dependency chain can match these, yhen I'll be open to considering them.

As it is, I do use the occasional external package, but I'm picky.

CoreFoundation is (partially?) open-source and cross-platform now: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

Partly this is doable because although RFC 2616 specifies a max URL length of 2048 bytes, most browsers allow much longer, with Chrome and Firefox allowing at least 64k chars (that's what they'll display but it seems like more is happily processed), while Safari allows URL strings up to 2GB in size[1]!

[1] https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/b23d...

Regarding your point #3, Swift does indeed have an open-source cross-platform implementation of Foundation. swift-corelibs-foundation

Foundation is open source and (mostly) works on Linux. What else do you want to see “opened up?”

Foundation is not the standard library of Swift. Swift has its own standard library that is bundled with the language on all platforms that are supported.

And Foundation itself isn't written in Swift, a good portion is written in C.

> A significant portion of the implementation of Foundation on Apple platforms is provided by another framework called CoreFoundation (a.k.a. CF). CF is written primarily in C and is very portable. Therefore we have chosen to use it for the internal implementation of Swift Foundation where possible. As CF is present on all platforms, we can use it to provide a common implementation everywhere.

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...