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Futhark by Example

78 pointsby toshtoday at 9:50 AM20 commentsview on HN

Comments

ethanlipsontoday at 10:42 AM

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.
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Ferret7446today at 11:27 AM

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.

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antran22today at 2:44 PM

Was expecting to see some examples of how to read runes, but I am nonetheless equally satisfied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark

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fulafeltoday at 12:37 PM

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

rowanG077today at 10:56 AM

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.

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guessmynametoday at 12:43 PM

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.

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