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Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

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Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#1

Post by adius »

Woxi is an interpreter for the Wolfram Language written in Rust.

It comes with Woxi Studio, a Mathematica-like GUI built with iced, but you can also use Woxi through a CLI, Jupyter kernel, Python package, npm package, or WASM module.

Compared with wolframscript / Mathematica, the main differences are:

- Free and open source - Very fast startup - Typically milliseconds rather than seconds for the Wolfram kernel, making Woxi practical for shell scripts, one-liners, and other short-lived processes - Embeddable - It can run in a browser via WASM or be embedded into another application as a scripting language

A more detailed comparison with Mathematica is available here: https://woxi.ad-si.com/docs/comparison/mathematica/.

Conformance is ensured with ~26'000 unit tests and ~900 .wls script snapshot tests.

The current focus is on fixing remaining edge cases, improving performance, and growing the community.

If you use the Wolfram Language, I'd be particularly interested in feedback on compatibility and missing functionality. Contributions and bug reports are also very welcome: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation
woxi.ad-si.com

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#5

Post by jshaqaw »

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source.

I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementations. Did Wolfram really discover the one true way in its language syntax and presentation layer? If it did, is the idea of open source really just making it unviable for companies to invest in important things like that? To be clear these are of course rhetorical questions. The open source world could experiment (and in defense sometimes does) with truly new approaches and interfaces. I just want to see more of it.

Mathematica exists. Mathematica for free versus Mathematica for money is of course a nice trade. But even better would be to try new ways to interact with mathematics unburdened from legacy concerns.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#6

Post by adius »

alex7o wrote: post #2

This was also posted 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155526

Since then, we've made more than 7,000 commits and massively expanded Woxi's feature set. So it's well worth another try for anyone who tried it back then!

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#7

Post by pama »

adius wrote: post #6
alex7o wrote: post #2

This was also posted 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155526

Since then, we've made more than 7,000 commits and massively expanded Woxi's feature set. So it's well worth another try for anyone who tried it back then!

You now fully support version 1.0. IIRC, the first version of Mathematica I used back in early 1993 was 2.1 soon followed by 2.2, which was useful for a couple of years. How much extra work is it to reach full compatibility with that version? (I had used MathLink at the time.)

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#8

Post by adius »

jshaqaw wrote: post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

I think the Wolfram Language got 80–90% of it right, and that's why I want to reimplement and use it in the first place. It bothers me that I have to use inferior solutions, such as those implemented in Python and Julia, just because the better solution is prohibitively expensive.

Of course, there are a few things I think we can do better than the Wolfram Language, but given all the available legacy code, there's really no point in making it slightly different and losing the ability to use that code. However, we might build an alternative syntax and frontend in the future that surfaces the capabilities of the Wolfram Language with a better UX.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#10

Post by adius »

pama wrote: post #7
adius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since then, we've made more than 7,000 commits and massively expanded Woxi's feature set. So it's well worth another try for anyone who tried it back then!

You now fully support version 1.0. IIRC, the first version of Mathematica I used back in early 1993 was 2.1 soon followed by 2.2, which was useful for a couple of years. How much extra work is it to reach full compatibility with that version? (I had used MathLink at the time.)

We currently support almost everything up to version 6.0. Here is a detailed comparison with all Mathematica versions: https://woxi.ad-si.com/docs/comparison/mathematica/

However, MathLink is one of the few exceptions as it is deprecated by now.

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