Editing Cilk (section)

===MIT Cilk===
The Cilk programming language grew out of three separate projects at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science:<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.cilkplus.org/cilk-history |title="A Brief History of Cilk |access-date=2015-06-25 |archive-date=2015-06-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150626125629/https://www.cilkplus.org/cilk-history |url-status=dead }}</ref>

* Theoretical work on scheduling multi-threaded applications.
* StarTech – a parallel [[computer chess|chess program]] built to run on the Thinking Machines Corporation's Connection Machine model CM-5.
* PCM/Threaded-C – a C-based package for scheduling continuation-passing-style threads on the CM-5

In April 1994 the three projects were combined and christened "Cilk". The name Cilk is not an acronym, but an allusion to "nice threads" ([[silk]]) and the C programming language. The Cilk-1 compiler was released in September 1994.

The original Cilk language was based on [[ANSI C]], with the addition of Cilk-specific keywords to signal parallelism. When the Cilk keywords are removed from Cilk source code, the result should always be a valid C program, called the ''serial elision'' (or ''C elision'') of the full Cilk program, with the same semantics as the Cilk program running on a single processor. Despite several similarities,{{which|date=September 2015}} Cilk is not directly related to AT&T Bell Labs' [[Concurrent C]].

Cilk was implemented as a translator to C, targeting the [[GNU C Compiler]] (GCC). The last version, Cilk 5.4.6, is available from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), but is no longer supported.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/ |title=The Cilk Project |date=8 October 2010 |access-date=25 January 2016 |publisher=MIT CSAIL}}</ref>

A showcase for Cilk's capabilities was the Cilkchess parallel chess-playing program, which won several computer chess prizes in the 1990s, including the 1996 Open Dutch Computer Chess Championship.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Leiserson |first1=Charles E. |first2=Aske |last2=Plaat |title=Programming parallel applications in Cilk |journal=SIAM News |volume=31 |year=1998 |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2427921}}</ref>