> Why do so few of these small programming language projects have a "why x?" section?
They do... you missed the Cray name in the logo, and the 'runs on HPC systems".
> How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their value?
I'm guessing their marketshare is already well defined, there aren't a ton of supercomputing clusters in the world.
> This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a sales pitch on their website.
See above. They only have to sell to a small fraction of people compared to your startup 'eatt the world' mentality.
> In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0].
And?
> This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate it.
Never needed to run code on big iron, gotcha.
> I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.
As this is not a language for startups, I don't think they care if you're annoyed. They are likely dealing more with multi-million dollar single project runs that could take months to complete.
At least look up the meaning of things like HPC before you just shove the concept through your narrow filter of expectations.
I don't expect to ever run high performance code like this, and I'm curious to see what the design could tell me just in passing.
I send jobs to HPC systems on a daily basis at work. This website fails miserably to capture me as a potential customer. The cray name has plenty of baggage, but that doesn't give this language value. I do not currently work in the startup space, but having done it, I get annoyed when people put so little effort into selling their projects. I'm sure that a lot of time was spent building this (it's been around for over a decade), but they've put essentially nothing into marketing it.
I run high performance multi node code at work, typically 1-2k cores continuously. I have several contracts with HPE. Am I not part of the target audience for this language?
I'm an HPC developer, my workstation is a 122 PetaFLOP machine.
I go to the Rust language website, and I am able to understand in 1 minute what's the language for, and what value it adds with respect to the alternatives.
I look the Chapel website, and I get nothing. So I have to guess, and my guess is that's a framework developed by one research group to publish research about parallel computing, but that almost nobody uses for anything real in practice - except for the one or two simulation tools that they managed to lock-in 10 years ago. It's not clear to me which value these adds w.r.t the alternatives, like pure MPI+OpenMP, HPX, Fortran co-arrays, and the other dozens or hundreds of half dead research projects that were supposed to "revolutionize" HPC over the last 4 decades. The sad part is that I'm probably right.
The 3 most used languages in "classical" HPC are C, C++ and Fortran. Python was barely used, but now the recent trend of building "AI" HPC national centers have put it in 4th place. The three most used parallel programming paradigms used are MPI (which a dozen of implementations available and in active development), OpenMP, and CUDA. The amount of people that use OpenCL in classical HPC is insignificant. There are more widely-used codes using OpenACC than Intel Thread Building blocks. The users of modern frameworks like HPX is almost non-existent, and the users of things like Chapel are a signed zero. I've access to a handful of >10 Petaflop systems, and none of them have Chapel even available through their module system.
This doesn't say anything at all over whether Chapel is actually good or bad. But it is actually the job of those getting public funding payed by taxpayer dollars to advertise why we should keep funding them and not fund something else. The fact that their website doesn't even try to pitch it suggest me that the only purpose of the project is for the group that develops it to explore interesting ideas and publish papers, as I mentioned above. That's definitely something worth doing, and often decades later these ideas percolate into solutions that people actually use. But simulation frameworks that run on the Top 10 supercomputers usually take hundreds of people and multiple decades to write, and aren't something that follow trendy research frameworks.
They do... you missed the Cray name in the logo, and the 'runs on HPC systems".
> How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their value?
I'm guessing their marketshare is already well defined, there aren't a ton of supercomputing clusters in the world.
> This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a sales pitch on their website.
See above. They only have to sell to a small fraction of people compared to your startup 'eatt the world' mentality.
> In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0].
And?
> This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate it.
Never needed to run code on big iron, gotcha.
> I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.
As this is not a language for startups, I don't think they care if you're annoyed. They are likely dealing more with multi-million dollar single project runs that could take months to complete.
At least look up the meaning of things like HPC before you just shove the concept through your narrow filter of expectations.
I don't expect to ever run high performance code like this, and I'm curious to see what the design could tell me just in passing.