[epgui]

Genuine question-- is there something about Futhark that makes it particularly well-suited for parallel execution compared to any other functional programming language (especially of the purely functional kind)? FP in general is inherently well suited for this application.

As I understand it, Futhark aims to leverage GPUs in particular, and that approach seems to be what makes it unique within the category of FP languages?

[Athas]

Functional languages have a core that is well suited for parallelism, but all mainstream functional languages have various features that are unsuitable for parallel execution - particularly if you want to target limited machines like GPUs.

The Futhark programming model is standard functional combinators: map, reduce, scan, etc. You can do that in any Functional language, and it is mostly trivial to rewrite a Futhark program in Haskell or SML or OCaml. Futhark removes a lot of things (like recursive data structures) to make efficient parallel execution easier (and even possible), and adds various minor conveniences. But you don't really need to add something for functional programming to be suitable for parallelism; you just have to avoid certain common things (like linked lists or laziness).