Tools

Chapel comes with a variety of tools to help with users write better Chapel code. All of these are distributed with Chapel in source form and most of them are distributed with Chapel in binary form as well.

Documentation

chpldoc is Chapel’s documentation generator, which generates API documentation for your code from inline docstrings. It is also used to generate the documentation for the Chapel language and standard library.

chpldoc

Development

Chapel has several tools to help with Chapel code development. Chapel’s language server (chpl-language-server) and linter (chplcheck) can help provide real-time feedback on your code as you write it. Mason is Chapel’s package manager and serves as a tool for building and managing your Chapel code, as well as distributing your libraries to the community.

Debugging

Chapel provides a few tools to help with debugging Chapel code. While Chapel code can be directly debugged inside of standard tools like LLDB and GDB, this can become challenging when debugging multilocale code. chpl-parallel-dbg is a wrapper around lldb that makes it easier to debug multilocale code. When debugging communication issues, chplvis can be used to visualize the communication patterns of your program.

Interoperability

Chapel provides several tools to help interoperate with other languages. c2chapel can automatically translate C header files to Chapel extern declarations, reducing much of the manual boilerplate required to write those declarations by hand. protoc-gen-chpl is a plugin to the protocol buffer compiler that generates Chapel code from .proto files, allowing you to easily serialize and deserialize structured data in Chapel.

Other

Chapel provides many other tools as well. chapel-py is an extremely powerful tool that provides a Python interface to the Chapel frontend compiler library. This lets you write custom Python tools that leverage the existing Chapel compiler infrastructure. Several of the tools mentioned here are powered by chapel-py.

The Unstable Warning Anonymizer is a script written in Chapel that can analyze the output of your Chapel program to generate reports on the use of unstable warnings in your code. This is useful for users to share what unstable features they rely on without sharing any implementation details of their code to Chapel developers to help prioritize stabilization efforts.