Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

by adamnemecek • 5 months ago

350 137 5 months ago

adius15• 5 months ago

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!

apetresc• 5 months ago

What percentage of the overall code was written primarily by agents?

cs7022• 5 months ago

https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi/graphs/contributors

muizelaar• 5 months ago

How does it compare to mathics?

How close is it to being able to run rubi: https://rulebasedintegration.org/?

disentanglement• 5 months ago

You can find the whole integration routine here https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi/blob/36343ab2cbc97e5081f7c811e.... It's essentially a test mock-up (not even trying partial fraction decomposition for rational functions).

cs7022• 5 months ago

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

It's a worthwhile effort. If successful, Woxi can enable a large mass of scientists and engineers who don't have access to Mathematica to run legacy code written for it. Also, Woxi would give those scientists and engineers who regularly use Mathematica a non-proprietary, less restrictive alternative, which many of them would welcome.

How does Woxi compare to other "clean-room implementations"[a] of the same language?

[a] Please check with a lawyer to make sure you won't run into legal or copyright issues.

utopiah• 5 months ago

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Naive question as I'm not familiar with Mathematica much (but aware of it and Wolfram Alpha and related tools), how does it compare to e.g. Jupyter or Julia or maybe another language (with its framework) that might be even closer?

adius15• 5 months ago

I think Wolfram Language is just so much more ergonomic. No need to import dependencies - everything's included and consistent, very readable - yet compact - syntax, less gotchas than Python, R, etc., sensible default, …

dist-epoch• 5 months ago

Why would I use this and not Wolfram Script?

Better license? Allowed for commercial operations?

adius15• 5 months ago

Exactly! And:

- Faster startup time because of no license check

- Can run multiple instances of Woxi at the same time

- Embeddable via WASM

- Configurable via compile time flags (which features should be included)

- …

redbluered2• 5 months ago

License is a big deal, and not just for cost and openness, but also for practical use in pages like docker, ci/cd pipeline, cloud deployments, or other places licenses need to be dynamic.

foobarqux3• 5 months ago

How is the popularity/rank in functions.csv determined?

adius15• 5 months ago

That's actually a value that Wolfram determines themselves. Here is the documentation for it: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/WolframLanguageDa...

Here is e.g. all the values for the Plus[] function:

$ wolframscript -code 'WolframLanguageData["Plus", "Ranks"]' {All -> 6, StackExchange -> 8, TypicalNotebookInputs -> 5, TypicalProductionCode -> 6, WolframAlphaCodebase -> 6, WolframDemonstrations -> 4, WolframDocumentation -> 4}

egl2020• 5 months ago

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.

adius15• 5 months ago

Hard to tell honestly. So far there was always some surprisingly straight forward solution If had any problems with the math engine. There is actually a lot of public research how equations can be solved/simplified with computer algorithms. So I'm optimistic. I also stumbled upon a few cases where Mathematica itself didn't quite do things correctly itself (rounding errors, missing simplifications, etc.). So maybe it's actually a little overhyped …

redbluered2• 5 months ago

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.

lupire• 5 months ago

Mathematica gets incorrect answers quite frequently.

foobarqux3• 5 months ago

Have you considered using quickcheck/random/property-based testing with LLM code generation to automate function implementation?

adius15• 5 months ago

Yeah, I've already looked into it, but decided to keep developing it "example driven" for now. Aka I'm playing around with it, and whenever I find something that's broken I keep a note of it and then I pick those notes one by one and implement them. Once the most common things are implemented I will start writing property tests to catch all the edge cases of each feature.

pwdisswordfishy2• 5 months ago

LSP?

adius15• 5 months ago

Not yet, but on the roadmap!

jacquesm• 5 months ago

What is your plan for long term support?

the__alchemist4• 5 months ago

I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.

amelius• 5 months ago

Yeah, the Mathematica language is the least interesting aspect of the Mathematica system. Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

aeonik2• 5 months ago

I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.

From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.

I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.

s3p2• 5 months ago

First I believe there is no such thing as the Mathematica language, it's Wolframscript which is useful in a bunch of different applications. And second, if you don't have access to a $1000 / yr wolfram subscription, this would be the next best thing.

stared• 5 months ago

The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me. 12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.

Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.

That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.

abdullahkhalids• 5 months ago

Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.

Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.

One of the best features of Mathematica system.

adius15• 5 months ago

Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.

the__alchemist4• 5 months ago

Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.

jjtheblunt• 5 months ago

i'm curious if you intend to reimplement highly optimized numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, and so on, accumulated and tuned in mathematica since its 1988 release?

it's a huuuuuuuuge amount of technology in the standard library of mathematica, beyond the surface syntax and rewrite system, i mean.

rustyhancock• 5 months ago

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.

3eb7988a1663• 5 months ago

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.

drnick1• 5 months ago

Half-assed reimplementations of existing software (often in the name of "memory safety") is what the Rust community is best known for.

the__alchemist4• 5 months ago

I find rust to be the best language and tool set in most categories. I still agree with this characterization.

nextaccountic4• 5 months ago

Mathematica is proprietary software. Any reimplementation is better than nothing at all, at least for people that don't run proprietary software

N_Lens• 5 months ago

Thanks for the sensible chuckle.

downboots2• 5 months ago

Great! Math tools for everyone.

what's stopping some Mathematica employee from taking the source code and having an agent port it. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm?

Will everything get copied eventually?

adius15• 5 months ago

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor...., a software clone does not infringe software copyright. So yeah, I'd guess sooner or later everything is going be cloned …

MengerSponge2• 5 months ago

what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source

Laws against theft. Also the same reason employees don't release the code on pastebin or something.

Who owns an algorithm?

The org or person who was granted the software patent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent

Will everything get copied eventually?

If we're lucky. More likely everything bitrots as technical capabilities are lost. Slowly at first, then quickly.

downboots2• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Y_Y3• 5 months ago

Which patent are you referring to?

fnord77• 5 months ago

vibe coded?

adius15• 5 months ago

Such a massive undertaking would be almost impossible without AI agents, so yeah, they help me. But with around 5000 tests, they are actually helping to improve the software quality!

throawayonthe2• 5 months ago

are all the tests hand written or are some agent-contributed? curious

tock• 5 months ago

Did you actually review 313,397 LOC written by claude? And you wrote the tests? That's honestly very impressive if yes.

WillAdams• 5 months ago

For folks who are considering passing, note that there is a "Jupyter Lite" mode in addition to "Woxi Studio" --- seems very promising and the former addressed my first concern out-the-gate.

esafak• 5 months ago

I wonder if it would make a good Zeppelin interpreter. https://zeppelin.apache.org/

adius15• 5 months ago

Oh cool, haven't heard of this before. Could be a good fit - I'll have to try it out some day!

anandijain• 5 months ago

This is cool! I've always wanted a polished kernel on the terminal. I spent a lot of time a few years ago writing my own Wolfram Kernel. It was a blast to understand how a pattern matching (symbolic) language is implemented.

https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs

singularity2001• 5 months ago

Is the syntax for symbolic computation already near optimal or should something be rethought and redone?

oofbey3• 5 months ago

AGPL licensed. An interesting choice. Author really doesn’t want Wolfram to use it??

adius15• 5 months ago

Why should I want them to use it?

oofbey3• 5 months ago

Well it would get vastly more popular if it was officially endorsed. Do you want lots of people using it?

peterus• 5 months ago

I regularly use Mathematica for working with symbolic expressions (for its DSolve and transfer function stuff) and it is way more maintainable and elegant to have fractions, symbols and powers rendered in math mode instead of having to deal with a text only representation. Are there any front ends (either custom or somehow extending jupyter) for this project which recreate this experience?

lejalv2• 5 months ago

Maybe http://texmacs.org would fit here!

samwillis• 5 months ago

Have you considered doing property tests with Mathematica as an oracle?

An ai based development workflow with a concrete oracle works very well. You still need the research and planing to solve things in a scalable way, but it solves the "are the tests correct" issue.

What we've done is pull out failing property tests as a unit tests, makes regression testing during the agentic coding loop much more efficient.

Grosvenor2• 5 months ago

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 woxilang. This will kill you long term.

The right approach is to have a tiny core interpreter, maybe go to JIT at some point if you can figure that out. Then implement all the functionality in woxilang itself. That means addition and subtraction, calculus, etc are term rewriting rules written in woxilang, not rust code.

This frees you up in the interpreter. Any improvements you make there will immediately show up over the entire language. It's also a better language to implement symbolic math in than rust.

It also means contributors only need to know one language: woxilang. No need to split between rust and woxilang.

adius15• 5 months ago

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?

Grosvenor2• 5 months ago

You have two distinct products 1) An interpreter 2) a math language. Don't write your math in some funny imperative computer language.

Keep the interpreters surface area as small as possible. Do some work to make sure you can accelerate numeric, and JIT/compile functions down to something as close to native as you can.

Wolfram, and Taliesin Beynon have both said Wolfram were working internally to get a JIT working in the interpreter loop. Keep the core small, and do that now while it's easy.

Also, it's just easier to write in Mathematica. It's probably 10x smaller than the rust code:

    f[x_Integer]:=13*x;
    f::help:="Multiplies x by 13, in case you needed an easy function for that."

EDIT: Another important thing to note is the people who really deeply know specific subjects in math won't be the best, or even good rust programmers. So letting them program in woxilang will give the an opportunity to contribute which they wouldn't have had otherwise.

layer84• 5 months ago

Symbolic manipulation?

0x3f• 5 months ago

Switching out to an interpreted language has got to be anathema to a rewrite-it-in-Rust project

nextaccountic4• 5 months ago

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

tadfisher• 5 months ago

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.

evanb2• 5 months ago

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

porcoda• 5 months ago

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)

conradev• 5 months ago

I’ve personally had luck at correcting the complex one-off logic the agents produce with the right prompting.

and when I say prompting, I just mean code review feedback. All of this is engineering management. I review code. I’ll point out architectural flaws if they matter and I use judgement to determine if they matter. Code debt is a choice, and you can afford it in some situations but not others. We don’t nit over style because we have a linter. Better documentation results in better contribution quality. etc.

Agent coordination? Gastown? All I hear is organizational design and cybernetics

larodi2• 5 months ago

Sorry, perhaps, a dumb question:

Is it not that Mathematica, and most of the Wolfram innovation, is about a smart way of applying some rule-based inference. I think of it as parametrized PROLOG rules, with large lib. So term rewriting all the way to the end, correct me if I'm wrong.

Where does the mini-core+JIT come into this?

Thanks for taking time to answer.

Hendrikto• 5 months ago

The interpreter / JIT is the one actually applying the rules.

LowLevelKernel• 5 months ago

Many Wolfram language algorithms are proprietary right?

evanb2• 5 months ago

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.

asdfe3r343• 5 months ago

How did claude code became contributor?

unexpectedtrap• 5 months ago

Glad to see Rust project under AGPL-3.0. I wish to see more Rust projects under (A)GPL, because (A)GPL is rare in the Rust community for some reason.

RagnarD• 5 months ago

Have you gotten any nastygrams from Wolfram about this? They're pretty protective of their IP. Not saying I think that it's some violation of it, but I could see them being alarmed.

qubex• 5 months ago

Wow! Do my eyes deceive me? What kind of ‘sunset’ are we talking of here?!

Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

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