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Comment by koolkao | Hacker News Reader

Mac only at the moment

Language creator here (didn't expect to see this!). Spot on about WebCL not being widely deployed yet, which means code generating it is mostly for kiosk etc. purposes.

For more immediate deployment, I have most of an alternative codegen working that emits multicore + GPU code. Basically, CSS selectors + layout are multicore via asm.js + web workers + typed arrays, and GPU rendering via WebGL.

If anyone is interested in an alternative GPU backend for layout + CSS selectors, say via Rivertrail or old school GPGPU, drop a line :)

... and perhaps more important for HN, we're also thinking about going full-time on the project by building some services on top of it.

I'd love to hear if anyone would be interested in:

-- web-based data visualization on mobile that is 50X+ faster than libraries such as D3

-- massive visualizations on the laptop with ~1MM data points real-time

I'd love some kind of posting on FTL: on why it was introduced, what constraints it has, what it enables Superconductor to do that couldn't be done with a general purpose language.

Did you give any thought to trying to intake JavaScript itself as the target language?

We originally built FTL to help formalize and automatically parallelize CSS. (Results of that work are going into Mozilla's Servo browser.) That includes constructs for both declarative layout and declarative parallelization. Our PPOPP 2013 paper is the best place to look right now, and a video of my talk at SFJS last week should be posted soon.

We already have JS as a target language ;-) You can try an old version here: http://jsfiddle.net/lmeyerov/Awubf/ . It's similar to the current lang version except without macros. I'm hoping to have a full release with tutorials and a fast non-WebCL version by September, but we'll see :)

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