Chapel project meeting: 2025-09-09 (agenda items, meeting link, notes)

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This discussion is for the weekly Chapel project meeting.

Date/Time: 2025-09-09 at 10am PT
Join the meeting using this Teams link

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Prior to the meeting, propose any agenda items using comments below. After the meeting, rough notes will be added in comments.

Typically, these meetings consist of:

• News: Quick updates or announcements to keep people in the loop on key efforts or topics
• Demos: Have something cool to show off? Do it in a ~5-minute demo
• Short Topics: Have something that needs a quick discussion, description, or straw poll? Propose a ~5-minute discussion topic
• Longer Topics: If you have a topic needing more time, propose it with an estimated duration and we'll try to fit it in.

If you'd like to propose an item in any of these categories, please reply to this discussion.

In addition to the above sections, we have some standing agenda items, such as:

• Triage: What is the state of testing and are there issues that need more attention?
• User Issues: What new user issues have come up in the past week, and which should we prioritize?
• Q&A: Have something you want to ask, but not on the clock? We'll open the floor to Q&A as the official meeting wraps up.

[jabraham17]

I will have a debugging demo of improved debugging for tuples, enums, and other quality of life improvements

[lydia-duncan]

Here's today's user issues report

[bradcray]

Notes from this week's meeting:

Agenda / Notes

News/Announcements

• 2.6 release timeline:

  • code freeze tomorrow
  • doc freeze Thursday
  • release Sept 18

• HPSF TSC formed and kicked off

  • 13 members (see meeting slides below for full list)
  • held first meeting last week in Thursday deep-dive slot
    • intros to HPSF, TSC, TSC members
    • voted on and approved draft technical charter
    • discussed first-draft GOVERNANCE.md, taking review + vote offline:
      Revisions to GOVERNANCE.md to reflect the draft Tech Charter governance#3
    • generated questions relative to the naming of the LLC
      • Brad to meet with LF legal tomorrow to discuss
    • primed the discussion for timing of considering project renaming
    • slides and notes available in new TSC repo
      • https://github.com/chapel-lang/TSC
  • next TSC meeting planned for next Thursday, Sept 18 in deep-dive slot

• Invited to participate in panel in upcoming SLAC data analytics workshop

  • Productive, Performant Software for Large Scale Scientific Data Analysis
  • https://lssda.github.io/
  • also pitched a lightning talk on Arkouda

Triage Status

• Engin: mid-rotation update
  • fallout through EX system update -- OS changes led to SW changes (Jade)
    • particularly hit our Nvidia GPU test configurations badly
  • verification failure (DavidL)
  • interop bug failure in asan/valgrind (or maybe C back-end) (Jade)
    • should be resolved today
  • sporadic vagrant issue (Anna, but thinks we're OK and hitting sys issues)

User Issues

• Lydia: weekly report
  • no new user issues
  • one resolved: failure reported previous week in which an old binary-trees
    version of the CLBG benchmark hit a compiler error; improved error (Jade)

Demos

• Jade: debugging demo
  • 'breakpoint;' statement now behaves better (doesn't dump into C-level code)
  • pretty-printing of strings, bools are now better
  • can assign boolean value to false and have it stick (and enums)
  • can print out enums and see const/identifier name rather than int value
  • all done in support of printing classes/arrays properly (not yet pretty)
  • tuples also pretty print more nicely
    Brad: When printing, can we change '(type) val' into 'val: type' to
    have the syntax look more like a Chapel type constraint rather
    than a C type cast?
    Jade: Not easily. Can control pretty-printing through hooks, but
    can't really control how type prefix is printed. Can also
    interpret this not as a C cast, but as a parenthetical, just
    telling you what type is being printed.
    Engin: Similarly, could member names be printed with . rather than ::?
    Jade: Would need to get Dwarf 6 to support Chapel, which we should do
    Engin: Can Chapel syntax highlighting be enabled in LLDB?
    Jade: Pretty sure it's the same problem, but yes.
    Engin: How can I get back to C-level debugging as a developer when needed
    Jade: There are some target variable and frame variable commands which
    permit that (e.g., 'v myStr')
    Brad: Demo?
    Jade: Wants to get arrays and domains to not segfault debugger first

Discussion Topics

Post-meeting

Office Hours / Q&A

• Rinor Ramli stuck around for questions about Hypergraphs in Chapel and
  being interested in creating sparse representations in support of them.
  • insight that many probabilistic computations are well-suited to be
    modeled as Hypergraphs
  • trying to create a database where people can create probabilistic
    programs with a focus on expressiveness, yet still to be fast enough
    to be used in actual statistical computing use-cases
  • one more very big use-case: host bayseian neural networks in order
    to accelerate HPC-AI systems

TODOs / Open Issues

• Send Rinor pointers to PNNL CHGL work and sparse features in Chapel