Futhark by Example: A Hands-On Tour of the Parallel Array Language

Futhark’s documentation team has assembled a graduated collection of commented example programs designed to introduce the parallel functional array language through working code rather than prose explanation. The catalog moves from primitive types, arrays, and basic parallelism through programming techniques like radix sort, Kahan summation, histograms, and binary search, then on to automatic differentiation, literate Futhark with gnuplot integration, and ports of Dex examples covering Mandelbrot sets, ray tracing, and Brownian motion.

Beyond the tutorial material, the page surfaces real Futhark projects in the wild: a falling-sand game (Diving Beet), several ray tracers including implementations of Peter Shirley’s book series, a webcam filter app (Futcam), a Filecoin-tuned Poseidon hash implementation (Neptune), a lattice Boltzmann simulator, and the Pareas compiler. The author concedes most Futhark code still lives in the compiler’s own test suite, but the list signals the language is being used for graphics, simulation, and cryptographic kernels where GPU parallelism pays off.

For practitioners evaluating array languages or GPU-targeted DSLs, the page functions as both a learning path and a credibility check — showing what idiomatic Futhark looks like across difficulty levels and what kinds of workloads it handles in practice.