adius

My theory is that writing as much as possible in Rust will improve performance and produce higher-quality code due to Rust's static typing. So far, it's been working well, but the final verdict is still out.

Author here: I absolutely do not understand this mindset. It has almost 20K unit tests by now and hundreds of full end-to-end tests of complicated scripts to ensure it works and matches the output of Wolframscript. Why does it matter that I was using Claude to help me implement it?

Mathics (https://mathics.org/) has been working on a Mathematica clone for years and hasn't had any problems so far. There have been many legal cases establishing that APIs are't copyrightable, and since Woxi shares zero code with Mathematica, it should be fine.

No support for intermediate steps yet, but if there is interest in it, I'd be happy to prioritize it.

Thanks! I'm hoping to use libraries for this, but unfortunately there aren't many available in Rust yet for those kinds of problems.

Integrating Symbolica would be awesome, but our licenses are incompatible at the moment. If you're willing to relicense parts for Woxi, I'd be happy to work on this together!

For short scripts, it’s often faster because there’s less initialization overhead. In general, though, it largely depends on whether the functions you’re using already have optimized implementations in Woxi. That’s what I’m currently working on, so I’d appreciate any feedback on what doesn’t work for you yet!

As an alternative, I’m working on reimplementing Wolfram Language/ Mathematica in Rust: https://woxi.ad-si.com/ A lot of Wolfram Language code just works already!

As an alternative, I’m working on reimplementing Wolfram Language/ Mathematica in Rust: https://woxi.ad-si.com/

A lot of Wolfram Language code just works already!

LLMs are now smart enough to simply download the code of any project they want to inspect. So this argument doesn't really hold up anymore …

Thanks! I'm using [Anki Panky](https://github.com/kamalsacranie/anki-panky) for generating the flashcards and then [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) itself for learning them.

I tried out numerous audio tagging apps (Kid3, Picard, …) and wasn't happy with any of them. They all try to work with some kind of library system of have a really bad UX (single line input for Lyrics???).

Therefore I decided to build one that is simple, fast, with great defaults: https://github.com/ad-si/Taguar

It's built with Rust's [Iced] and [lofty].

Looking forward to your feedback!

[Iced]: https://iced.rs [lofty]: https://github.com/Serial-ATA/lofty-rs

Not yet, but on the roadmap!

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?

Why should I want them to use it?

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.

They rebranded it to Wolfram Language a few years ago (which I actually appreciate, as it is so much more than just "math" by now!)

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/02/what-should-we-c...

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

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, …

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 …

It's having ~ 5000 tests already. Used correctly, AI agents can help you improve the quality of the code!

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!

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 …

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)

- …

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}

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.

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!

Yes, definitely! This is one of Mathematica’s hallmark features and it would not be complete without it.

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

Yes, we agree that a lot of the value comes from the huge standard library. That's why we try to implement as much of it as possible. Right now we support more than 900 functions. All the Data functions will be a little more complicated of course, but they could e.g make a request to online data archives (ourworldindata.org, wikidata.org, …). So I think it's definitely doable.

We also want to provide an option for users to add their own functions to the standard library. So if they e.g. need `FinancialData[]` they could implement it themselves and provide it as a standard library function.

Yes, definitely! So we also try to implement as much of it as possible. Currently we support over 900 functions of the 6000 from Mathematica!

I also think that sandboxing is crucial. That’s why I’m working on a Wolfram Language interpreter that can be run fully sandboxed via WebAssembly: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi