Tail2futhark

** Warning: tail2futhark has not been kept fully up to date with recent changes in Futhark. However, it would not be a large job to fix it.**

With tail2Futhark it is possible to compile APL programs - through apltail - to Futhark and thereby target GPGPU architectures supported by the Futhark project.

Status

Installation

Use Stack to build the tail2futhark compiler.

To get all the prerequisites for building (including, if necessary, the appropriate version of the Haskell compiler), run:

stack setup

Notice that this command will not install anything system-wide and will have no effect outside the tail2futhark build directory. Now, run the following command to build the tail2futhark compiler, including all dependencies:

stack build

You can install tail2futhark to your $HOME/.local/bin directory by running:

stack install

Make sure this directory is in your $PATH. Alternatively, just copy the binary to where you need it.

Prerequisites

To use tail2futhark and to test it, you need a working version of the APLtail compiler, which allows for compiling APL programs into TAIL programs, suitable for input to tail2futhark.

Notice: For installation instructions, you may consult the .travis.yml file, which documents the APLtail installation procedure for Linux boxes.

Usage

There are two ways to invoke tail2futhark, corresponding to whether you want to compile a program with a main function, or a library with multiple entry points. In the former case, run

tail2futhark prog.tail -o prog.fut

which results in a Futhark program defining a main function.

In the latter case, run

tail2futhark --library prog1.tail ... progN.tail -o prog.fut

This command results in a Futhark program with one entry point for every .tail file. The name of each entry point will match the name of the file, with .tail stripped off.

APL to TAIL

While stricly not the domain of tail2futhark, this is a handy command line for translating an APL file to a TAIL file suitable for consumption by tail2futhark:

aplt -p_types -s_tail -c -o foo.tail ${TAIL_ROOT}/lib/prelude.apl foo.apl

Here, $TAIL_ROOT must point to a checkout of the TAIL source repository.

Testing

To test the compiler, run the command:

make test

Yet an alternative is to run

(cd tests/basic_tests; make testopencl)

See the Prerequisites section for information about the required apltail compiler.