Templates problem

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thu, 2016-09-08 at 15:45 +0000, deXtoRious via Digitalmars-d-learn
wrote:
> 
[…]
> It's very early days for Chapel at the moment, but I don't really 
> see it as being remotely comparable to D or even Julia, it's much 
> closer to a DSL than a general purpose language. That's by no 
> means a bad thing, it seems like it could be a very useful tool 
> in a few years, but it's never going to completely substitute for 
> the likes of Python, C++ or D even for purely scientific 
> programming. I'm also a bit concerned about how limited the 
> compile time facilities seem there at the moment, but I guess 
> we'll just have to wait and see how it develops over the next 
> couple of years.

In some sense Chapel is a 12 year old programming language, but clearly
it is still a bit of a youngster in many ways. In that Chapel was
developed to deal with programming supercomputers, it is a niche
language for heavyweight computation. But that is exactly what Python
is missing, and whilst NumPy, Numba, Cython, C, C++, Fortran, and D can
help, none of them can make programming parallel systems quite as nice
as a language specifically designed for the job.

Chapel programming has a not dissimilar "feel" to D programming in many
ways, it's just that Chapel is aimed at big kit, and D isn't. The trick
though is that Chapel can be used on little kit as well and in this
sense competes directly with D. The Chapel team are well funded, but
are still focused on big kit, but are turning their attention to
traction and little kit. In this sense Chapel could be a risk to D
traction.

Chapel focuses on arrays so it is very much a competitor to NumPy.
Except that NumPy has many more years of things built on top of it than
Chapel has.

For programming computations for anything other than a small laptop,
I'd choose Chapel over Python/NumPy any day. For visualising the
results teh Python milieu wins hands down.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d-learn/attachments/20160910/57769032/attachment.sig>