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Futhark by Example

The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them. For a conventional introduction to the language, Parallel Programming in Futhark may be a better choice. For more examples, you can check our implemented benchmarks. We also maintain a list of projects using Futhark.

Some of the example programs use directives for plotting or rendering graphics.

Basic language features

Programming techniques

Automatic differentiation

Literate Futhark

Plotting

Literate Futhark allows direct use of gnuplot. These examples show simple and common cases.

Examples from Dex

The following examples are ported from Dex, a dependently typed functional array language that uses a somewhat different approach to describing loop processing. We've tried to keep the original naming scheme and programming style.

External examples

Projects using Futhark

The majority of written Futhark code is probably still Futhark’s own test and benchmark suites. However, there are some programs that have been written in Futhark because it was a good tool for the job, and not just to test the compiler. A possibly incomplete list:

Diving Beet is a falling sand game, which is a kind of simple particle simulator toy. Its main purpose is to produce pretty effects. There is a blog post with details and a video.

Futball is a game about avoiding getting hit by balls. The rendering engine is a ray tracer written in Futhark.

Futcam is an application that applies stacks of interactively configurable filters to a webcam stream. Futhark is used to implement the filters.

Futracer is a fairly slow brute-force ray tracer written in Futhark.

Futswirl is a fractal generator based on iterated function systems.

Neptune is an implementation of the Poseidon hash function tuned for Filecoin, where the GPU parts have been implemented in Futhark.

Palathark is a Futhark implementation of the lattice Boltzmann method.

Ray Tracing in One Weekend in Futhark and Ray Tracing: the Next Week in Futhark are implementations based on Peter Shirley's book series. These are by no means real-time ray tracers, but support advanced effects and make use of acceleration structures like BVH trees.

Pareas is a compiler implemented in Futhark and C++.