Posted by adius 7 hours ago
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
Beware of copyright issues for API's and patent issues about reimplementations. Wolfram seems serious about his I.P.. After the Oracle case, I'm not reimplementing any language unless it's open with no patent trolling possible.
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.
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.
I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.
UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.
Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.
The answer in my mind is fairly obvious: it's far more difficult and risky to do high-quality original work and give it away for free. If you want to see more original innovative work in open source, the two main ways to achieve that are to either do it yourself, or to pay others to do it.