I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this, but if you're going to compare to your system wc without trying to figure out if it was compiled with -O3 [EDIT: and what source code it was compiled from], you haven't shown anything in the sequential case.
What this article does show is that Futhark really does allow one to express this in a much simpler way than Haskell.
What this article does show is that Futhark really does allow one to express this in a much simpler way than Haskell.