> So, the question is, do functional languages automatically have the ability to take this instruction, and spread the data over multiple cores, or multiple pro

> So, the question is, do functional languages automatically have the ability to take this instruction, and spread the data over multiple cores, or multiple processors, in order to return the final answer, in a faster or more efficient process than a regular procedural language? Purely functional languages make it trivial to get correct parallelism. In all cases, such a 'map' can be parallelised without risk of race conditions. Impure languages rely either on complex analyses to figure out when parallelism is safe, or on programmer annotations. Whether it's a good idea to parallelise 'map' automatically is a different question. More parallelism is not always better, as all parallelism comes with overhead. Indeed, the entire point of this ray tracing benchmark is to investigate to which degree the trivial exploitation of parallelism also translates to good performance in practice (as that is ultimately the purpose of parallelism).