11 ms·

A Mathematica interpreter in Typescript

121 points by lispybanana 2y ago

coffeemug 2y ago
Hey, that's my project! I just wrote another post about perf benchmarking it against Mathematica proper-- https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench. Really surprised by the result, on the workload I tested Mathematica is only 2x faster than my barely optimized interpreter. A testament to the V8 engine, I didn't quite realize how ridiculously good V8 is until running this benchmark.
- anandijain 2y ago
  that's awesome, I wrote a Mathematica clone too! I think it's one of the most rewarding projects I've done. The amazing thing is how Mathematica starts working with just a few simple ideas, evaluator, backtracking pattern matcher, and a REPL. were you able to implement Condition? how advanced is the pattern matcher? I got stuck after doing Blank BlankSequence and BlankNullSequence https://github.com/anandijain/cas3.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas3.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs
  - coffeemug 2y ago
    Very cool! Pattern matcher isn't very advanced, I only spent maybe two days on it. Only supports Blank, Pattern, and PatternTest. (Also doesn't handle Flat, so for example in Mathematica `Times[x_, y_]` will match `Times[a, b, c]`, but it currently doesn't in ts-wolfram.) I'm new to Mathematica, so didn't know about `Condition` (thanks for mentioning it) It was a little hard to get going, the parsing stage usually stops me because I never learned a good parser generator well enough to just start writing code. But once I got ts-parsec working, the rest was fairly easy. I think I got `D` to work within like two days. Was also very surprised how much you can do with so little! Shoot me an email at coffeemug@gmail.com, let's chat more!
    - anandijain 2y ago
      just sent u an email and yeah I ditched the m expr parser and just made the dumbest parser I could haha
samlittlewood 2y ago
So tempted to try this myself in another language - just so I can call in ‘tungsten’.
- stared 2y ago
  Tungsten oxide - for one in Rust.
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    Wrust? (O_3), more properly tungstic
Someone 2y ago
> Certainly Mathematica’s term rewrite loop is optimized to death, and I only spent an hour or two making the most basic optimization I suspect this benchmarks begint libraries more than term rewriting. A way to test that may be: bif[1] := 0 bif[2] := 0 bif[n_] := bif[n-2] + bif[n-1] Timing[Do[bif[15], 1000]] You can check that neither tool is smart enough to solve that to bif[n_] := 0 by comparing running times for different large limits.
- bonzini 2y ago
  Fib(15) is just 610, so no big int involved. As a quick double-check, fib(n)< 2^(n-1) and 2^14 is 16384.
  - groos 2y ago
    This is not the Fibonoacci sequence because the first two terms are 0 and hence the entire sequence is 0.
    - bonzini 2y ago
      Indeed, the Fibonacci sequence is in the original benchmark and Fib(15) is not benchmarking big integer performance. It should have the same characteristics as the always-zero function.
      - spinningslate 2y ago
        I think gp's point is that bif[n_] == 0 for all n_. A 'smart' optimser would recognise this and so the time to compute would be (a) constant irrespective of the value of n_, and (b) instantaneous because the function call can be re-rewritten as the constant value 0.
        bonzini 2y ago
        Understood, and my point is that user Someone suggested "bif" as a way to avoid testing bigint performance; but fib[15] does not test bigint performance. So using bif is unnecessary and potentially harmful if it's optimized to zero.
Y_Y 2y ago
I applaud calling the language Mathematica, despite Stephen Mathematica's attempts to rename it a couple of years ago. See also: https://mathics.org/ https://mathics.org/ It's a more mature and complete reimplementation of Mathematica, though still miles behind the original.
- lupire 2y ago
  The name of the program is ts-wolfram.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Probably just one of those cute auto generated names like "interestingalpacagoose"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Unfortunately when Wolfram hired Mathics' lead developer, the project pretty much stopped.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    When was that? https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core/graphs/contributors https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core/graphs/contributors The project seems to have had a decent level of contributions for the last couple of years.
    - jhbadger 2y ago
      It seems to have been restarted, which is good. But for a while (look at the the 2017-2020 gap) there was basically nothing done to it and for a while it was impossible to run on current versions of Python.
- gklitz 2y ago
  Mathematica is the application. Wolframlang is the language. They are both extremely impressive each in their way, but they aren the same.
sillying 2y ago
Mathematica has thousand of functions, this seems to be just an algorithm for defining and using rules like that in mathematica.
lacker 2y ago
I'm curious what people use Mathematica for. I know some people who use it academically. Does anyone use it in a non-academic professional context? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does, what they are using it for.
- porcoda 2y ago
  I use it regularly. Mostly for visualization and prototyping ideas. I’ve tried over the years to replace it with Python/Sage, but the giant library of builtin functions always pulls me back. Plus, the lisp-ish language I prefer over Python. The visualization capabilities are quite nice too - not just data or function plots, but the ability to construct relatively complex graphics programmatically is quite useful. On a recent project where I needed to build some data structures for spatial processing in 3d, I was able to build a nice 3d visualization to help me debug my code by visualizing the calculations I was doing. I also really like the backwards compatibility of notebooks: I have mathematica notebooks dating back to the 90s, many of which still work fine (modulo some visual ugliness due to changes they made to layout and presentation over the decades). Few other tools have that longevity.
- derjames 2y ago
  In the company I work for, I was using Mathematica as a general scripting language, for designing algorithms, plotting data in 2D/3D, photo/video editing , and some occasional algebraic manipulations. Sadly the company did not renew the license because they needed to cut costs. They asked me to port all my tooling to other languages and tools: now I have a mixture of python, matplotlib/gnuplot, ruby, maxima, ffmpeg, imagemagik and octave. So far good but I preferred to have everything under one GUI/interface and Mathematica was giving me that.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  I have a non-commercial license that I use personally. The appeal of mathematica is that it has a library already built into it for just about everything which lets you quickly prototype and reason about fairly complex cross domain problems and then easily visualize them. Mathematica unfortunately has a lot of warts and rough edges clustered in specific fields (low level cryptography and binary manipulation heavy algorithms) which makes working with it a pain in the ass if you touch those fields regularly but outside of those specific fields it's fantastic. And I can claim praise doubly so if you get the System Modeler/Modelica license as well. With those two together you can model a project using analog circuits, digital circuits, software running on hardware/RTOS, pneumatics, hydraulics, CFD, multibody physics, etc all running in a unified environment. And then of course from a high level you can tune parameters that drive all the parts of your model and test out swapping in different parts or running under different conditions. You can do all the stuff that Mathematica and System Modeler are good for with other software packages cobbled together but that takes a lot more time to do and the integrations tend to not be nearly as clean. The only other product package on the market that compares would be MathWork's MATLAB + Simulink. The main difference being that Mathwork's products are more comprehensive in what all they cover but they tend to be less pleasant to work with.
peter_d_sherman 2y ago
>"Writing a toy differentiator turns out to be shockingly easy. It’s a near verbatim transcription of differentiation rules from any calculus textbook: D[_?NumberQ, x_Symbol] = 0; D[x_, x_Symbol] = 1; D[Times[expr1_, expr2_], x_Symbol] = D[expr1, x] expr2 + D[expr2, x] expr1; D[Plus[expr1_, expr2_], x_Symbol] = D[expr1, x] + D[expr2, x]; D[Sin[x_], x_Symbol] = Cos[x]; D[Cos[x_], x_Symbol] = -Sin[x]; D[f_Symbol[expr_], x_Symbol] := (D[f[x], x] /. x -> expr) * D[expr, x]; D[Power[expr_, p_Integer], x_Symbol] := p expr^(p - 1) * D[expr, x]; " Absolutely brilliant! And simple! And terse! And brilliant!

121 points by lispybanana 2y ago

Hey, that's my project! I just wrote another post about perf benchmarking it against Mathematica proper-- https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench. Really surprised by the result, on the workload I tested Mathematica is only 2x faster than my barely optimized interpreter. A testament to the V8 engine, I didn't quite realize how ridiculously good V8 is until running this benchmark.

anandijain 2y ago
that's awesome, I wrote a Mathematica clone too! I think it's one of the most rewarding projects I've done. The amazing thing is how Mathematica starts working with just a few simple ideas, evaluator, backtracking pattern matcher, and a REPL. were you able to implement Condition? how advanced is the pattern matcher? I got stuck after doing Blank BlankSequence and BlankNullSequence https://github.com/anandijain/cas3.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas3.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs
- coffeemug 2y ago
  Very cool! Pattern matcher isn't very advanced, I only spent maybe two days on it. Only supports Blank, Pattern, and PatternTest. (Also doesn't handle Flat, so for example in Mathematica `Times[x_, y_]` will match `Times[a, b, c]`, but it currently doesn't in ts-wolfram.) I'm new to Mathematica, so didn't know about `Condition` (thanks for mentioning it) It was a little hard to get going, the parsing stage usually stops me because I never learned a good parser generator well enough to just start writing code. But once I got ts-parsec working, the rest was fairly easy. I think I got `D` to work within like two days. Was also very surprised how much you can do with so little! Shoot me an email at coffeemug@gmail.com, let's chat more!
  - anandijain 2y ago
    just sent u an email and yeah I ditched the m expr parser and just made the dumbest parser I could haha

samlittlewood 2y ago

So tempted to try this myself in another language - just so I can call in ‘tungsten’.

stared 2y ago
Tungsten oxide - for one in Rust.
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  Wrust? (O_3), more properly tungstic

Someone 2y ago

> Certainly Mathematica’s term rewrite loop is optimized to death, and I only spent an hour or two making the most basic optimization I suspect this benchmarks begint libraries more than term rewriting. A way to test that may be: bif[1] := 0 bif[2] := 0 bif[n_] := bif[n-2] + bif[n-1] Timing[Do[bif[15], 1000]] You can check that neither tool is smart enough to solve that to bif[n_] := 0 by comparing running times for different large limits.

bonzini 2y ago
Fib(15) is just 610, so no big int involved. As a quick double-check, fib(n)< 2^(n-1) and 2^14 is 16384.
- groos 2y ago
  This is not the Fibonoacci sequence because the first two terms are 0 and hence the entire sequence is 0.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    Indeed, the Fibonacci sequence is in the original benchmark and Fib(15) is not benchmarking big integer performance. It should have the same characteristics as the always-zero function.
    - spinningslate 2y ago
      I think gp's point is that bif[n_] == 0 for all n_. A 'smart' optimser would recognise this and so the time to compute would be (a) constant irrespective of the value of n_, and (b) instantaneous because the function call can be re-rewritten as the constant value 0.
      - bonzini 2y ago
        Understood, and my point is that user Someone suggested "bif" as a way to avoid testing bigint performance; but fib[15] does not test bigint performance. So using bif is unnecessary and potentially harmful if it's optimized to zero.

Y_Y 2y ago

I applaud calling the language Mathematica, despite Stephen Mathematica's attempts to rename it a couple of years ago. See also: https://mathics.org/ https://mathics.org/ It's a more mature and complete reimplementation of Mathematica, though still miles behind the original.

lupire 2y ago
The name of the program is ts-wolfram.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Probably just one of those cute auto generated names like "interestingalpacagoose"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jhbadger 2y ago
Unfortunately when Wolfram hired Mathics' lead developer, the project pretty much stopped.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  When was that? https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core/graphs/contributors https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core/graphs/contributors The project seems to have had a decent level of contributions for the last couple of years.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    It seems to have been restarted, which is good. But for a while (look at the the 2017-2020 gap) there was basically nothing done to it and for a while it was impossible to run on current versions of Python.
gklitz 2y ago
Mathematica is the application. Wolframlang is the language. They are both extremely impressive each in their way, but they aren the same.

sillying 2y ago

Mathematica has thousand of functions, this seems to be just an algorithm for defining and using rules like that in mathematica.

lacker 2y ago

I'm curious what people use Mathematica for. I know some people who use it academically. Does anyone use it in a non-academic professional context? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does, what they are using it for.

porcoda 2y ago
I use it regularly. Mostly for visualization and prototyping ideas. I’ve tried over the years to replace it with Python/Sage, but the giant library of builtin functions always pulls me back. Plus, the lisp-ish language I prefer over Python. The visualization capabilities are quite nice too - not just data or function plots, but the ability to construct relatively complex graphics programmatically is quite useful. On a recent project where I needed to build some data structures for spatial processing in 3d, I was able to build a nice 3d visualization to help me debug my code by visualizing the calculations I was doing. I also really like the backwards compatibility of notebooks: I have mathematica notebooks dating back to the 90s, many of which still work fine (modulo some visual ugliness due to changes they made to layout and presentation over the decades). Few other tools have that longevity.
derjames 2y ago
In the company I work for, I was using Mathematica as a general scripting language, for designing algorithms, plotting data in 2D/3D, photo/video editing , and some occasional algebraic manipulations. Sadly the company did not renew the license because they needed to cut costs. They asked me to port all my tooling to other languages and tools: now I have a mixture of python, matplotlib/gnuplot, ruby, maxima, ffmpeg, imagemagik and octave. So far good but I preferred to have everything under one GUI/interface and Mathematica was giving me that.
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
I have a non-commercial license that I use personally. The appeal of mathematica is that it has a library already built into it for just about everything which lets you quickly prototype and reason about fairly complex cross domain problems and then easily visualize them. Mathematica unfortunately has a lot of warts and rough edges clustered in specific fields (low level cryptography and binary manipulation heavy algorithms) which makes working with it a pain in the ass if you touch those fields regularly but outside of those specific fields it's fantastic. And I can claim praise doubly so if you get the System Modeler/Modelica license as well. With those two together you can model a project using analog circuits, digital circuits, software running on hardware/RTOS, pneumatics, hydraulics, CFD, multibody physics, etc all running in a unified environment. And then of course from a high level you can tune parameters that drive all the parts of your model and test out swapping in different parts or running under different conditions. You can do all the stuff that Mathematica and System Modeler are good for with other software packages cobbled together but that takes a lot more time to do and the integrations tend to not be nearly as clean. The only other product package on the market that compares would be MathWork's MATLAB + Simulink. The main difference being that Mathwork's products are more comprehensive in what all they cover but they tend to be less pleasant to work with.

peter_d_sherman 2y ago

>"Writing a toy differentiator turns out to be shockingly easy. It’s a near verbatim transcription of differentiation rules from any calculus textbook: D[_?NumberQ, x_Symbol] = 0; D[x_, x_Symbol] = 1; D[Times[expr1_, expr2_], x_Symbol] = D[expr1, x] expr2 + D[expr2, x] expr1; D[Plus[expr1_, expr2_], x_Symbol] = D[expr1, x] + D[expr2, x]; D[Sin[x_], x_Symbol] = Cos[x]; D[Cos[x_], x_Symbol] = -Sin[x]; D[f_Symbol[expr_], x_Symbol] := (D[f[x], x] /. x -> expr) * D[expr, x]; D[Power[expr_, p_Integer], x_Symbol] := p expr^(p - 1) * D[expr, x]; " Absolutely brilliant! And simple! And terse! And brilliant!