Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#91

Post by wolvesechoes » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #49

rustyhancock wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly I'm not sure Octave ever really got that polish to compete with MATLAB. SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly. PSPP remains almost unheard of among SPSS core users.

I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.

> It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license

And it failed at this.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#92

Post by porcoda » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

Grosvenor wrote: post #71

My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing. There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in…

I noticed the same thing, having also written an interpreter for the Wolfram language that focused on the core rule/rewriting/pattern language. At its heart it’s more or less a Lisp-like language where the core can be quite small and a lot of the functionality built via pattern matching and rewriting atop that. Aside from the sheer scale of WL, I ended up setting aside my experiments replicating it when I did performance comparisons and realized how challenging it would be to not just match WL in functionality but performance.

Woxi reminds me of some experiments I did to see how far vibe coding could get me on similar math and symbolic reasoning tools. It seems like unless you explicitly and very actively force a design with a small core, the models tend towards building out a lot of complex, hard-coded logic that ultimately is hard to tune, maintain, or reason about in terms of correctness.

Interesting exercise with woxi in terms of what vibe coding can produce. Not sure about the WL implementation though.

(For context, I write compiler/interpreter tools for a living - have been for a couple decades)

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#93

Post by hasley » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

wolvesechoes wrote: post #91

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.

> It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license And it failed at this.

I did my PhD with Octave. Sure, I did not have this nice convex optimization toolbox. But I had everything else I needed and did not need to wait because people arrived earlier in the lab and grabbed all floating licenses of, for instance, the communications toolbox.

However, I switched to Python during the last years.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#94

Post by layer8 » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

adius wrote: post #73

Grosvenor wrote: post #71

My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing. There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in…

Mh, I thought about this a little and came actually to exactly the opposite conclusion: Implement as much as possible in Rust to get the fastest code possible. Do you have any more insights why this should not be possible / unsustainable?

Symbolic manipulation?

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#95

Post by layer8 » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #72

mountainriver wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference if you review the code getting merged?

The difference is we can't tell if you reviewed the code.

To be fair, we also couldn’t tell for sure if they hand-wrote the code.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#96

Post by tadfisher » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #85

Grosvenor wrote: post #71

My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing. There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in…

implementing addition in woxilang itself?? this gotta be terribly slow. am i missing something?

You are missing the term "JIT", which would enable a host of runtime optimizations which include generating calls to some static piece of native code which performs addition.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#97

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #95

IshKebab wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is we can't tell if you reviewed the code.

To be fair, we also couldn’t tell for sure if they hand-wrote the code.

If they hand wrote the code we know they at least looked at it once.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#98

Post by evanb » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

> The initial focus is to implement a subset of the Wolfram Language so that it can be used for CLI scripting and notebooks.

If you have Mathematica installed you can write CLI scripts and notebooks.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#99

Post by evanb » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #85

Grosvenor wrote: post #71

My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing. There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in…

implementing addition in woxilang itself?? this gotta be terribly slow. am i missing something?

Mathematica has symbolic and infinite-precision addition, so you can't automatically take advantage of obvious compiled code.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#100

Post by redbluered » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 11:41 PM UTC

egl2020 wrote: post #29

adius wrote: post #2

Hi, I'm the main developer. We're steadily getting closer to the next release which will support most features of Mathematica 1.0 plus some of the most popular newer functions (> 900 overall!). AMA!

There's a mystique around Mathematica's math engine. Is this groundless, or will you eventually run into problems getting correct, identical answers -- especially for answers that Mathematic derives symbolically? The capabilities and results of the computer algebra systems that I've used varied widely.

Scmutils from MIT does a very good -- arguably better -- job for correctness. No symbolic integration by ideology and not identical. Sussman and Terman. Amazing attention to detailand correctness. Claude could probably bridge Scheme to Wolfram.

I'm not sure how important but- for-bug identical output really is.