As of 2015[update], versions of the SequenceL compiler generate parallel code in C++ and OpenCL, which allows it to work with most popular programming languages, including C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, and Python.
A platform-specific runtime manages the threads safely, automatically providing parallel performance according to the number of cores available, currently supporting x86, POWER8, and ARM platforms.
Primary funding was from NASA, which originally wanted to develop a specification language which was "self-verifying"; that is, once written, the requirements could be executed, and the results verified against the desired outcome.
NT is the semantic work-horse, being used to simplify and decompose structures, based on a dataflow-like execution strategy similar to GAMMA[6] and NESL.
[10][11] Though it was not the original intent, these new approaches allowed the language to parallelize a large fraction of the operations it performed, transparently to the programmer.
SequenceL is designed to be as simple as possible to learn and use, focusing on algorithmic code where it adds value, e.g., the inventors chose not to reinvent I/O since C handled that well.
As a result, the full language reference for SequenceL is only 40 pages, with copious examples, and its formal grammar has around 15 production rules.
The decision to compile to multithreaded C++ and support the 20+ Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Python, etc.)
To avoid the routine use of recursion common in many purely functional languages, SequenceL uses a technique termed normalize–transpose (NT), in which scalar operations are automatically distributed over elements of a sequence.
In SequenceL, a sequence of the numbers from 2 through z-1, inclusive, is just (2...(z-1)), so a program to find all of the primes between 100 and 200 can be written: Which, in English just says, If that condition isn't met, the function returns nothing.
The runtime environment is a pre-compiled set of libraries which works with the compiled parallelized C++ code to execute optimally on the target platform.
Various math and other standard function libraries are included as SequenceL source code to streamline the programming process and serve as best practice examples.