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Futhark by example (2020)

124 points by tosh

by ethanlipson

4 subcomments

Futhark is really such a great idea. I'm not convinced that dependent types are worth the cognitive overhead in general, but it's definitely worth it to include the length as part of the type information for dynamic arrays, e.g.:
```
  concat(Vec<T, n>, Vec<T, m>) -> Vec<T, n+m>
  matmul(Mat<T, n, m>, Mat<T, m, l>) -> Mat<T, n, l>
  head(Vec<T, n+1>) -> (T, Vec<T, n>)
```
This would have saved me so much headache debugging CUDA kernels and numpy!! I wish it were a first-class feature in those frameworks, and even general-purpose languages, but alas.

by lucb1e

3 subcomments

I was so confused by the word factorial in the first example for a language, but decided to click it and just see what it means
Turns out, Futhark != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futhark (runes, old germanic alphabet)
That's like calling your programming language Latin?! The title could use some disambiguation...

by Ferret7446

4 subcomments

It would be nice to not name your language after another language. (Yes I know it's a script, that doesn't change my point). I came here expecting something else.

by fulafel

1 subcomments

Futhark is a glimmer of light in the wasteland of C/C++ styled low level GPU languages.

by rowanG077

2 subcomments

Futhark is pretty great! And I have to say that the maintainer is insanely quick. It has happened on more than one occasion that I reported a bug and it's solved within the day. I have been using Futhark in prod for two years now and never had serious problems.

by antran22

1 subcomments

Was expecting to see some examples of how to read runes, but I am nonetheless equally satisfied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark

by guessmyname

2 subcomments

Couldn’t have chosen a more difficult (and ambiguous) name to pronounce, could you? It almost sounds like a curse that I often hear people say out in the bad streets of New York City.