Past discussion (2 years ago, 119 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297423
This software does symbolic maths, and it's commercially licensed. The site still seems to be lacking comparisons to other computer algebra systems.
The project is unrelated to this other Symbolica that does symbolic code execution, despite the similar sounding brief descriptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443587
There is at least one benchmark on the main page https://gist.github.com/benruijl/3c53b1b0aea88b978ae609e7369.... And although it would be nice if it was open source, it is still a much nicer setup than Mathematica, as it is source available, (+ some parts are truely open source), is much faster, can be used in rust or python (so no obscure bundled language to learn), and the license lets you use one core for free (always).
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!
How does it compare performance-wise?
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!
I've been doing some symbolica-like things recently in the https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal ecosystem. Not a full CAS, just enough symbolic math to maintain precision through the calculations.
Benchmarks against Symbolica and numerica here: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperlattice/blob/main/benchma...
I’ve been a rust user of symbolica since 0.1 and it is insane how much nicer it is to use now.
Builder patterns for constructing replacement rules (and now evaluators!), macros for namespacing symbols, and now the call trait to fill in for callables in rust.
Not to mention the broad implementation of arithmetic on Atoms (the expression type of symbolica) with other std types and with symbols.
Why not just Maxima, Reduce, or Cadabra2?
Author of Symbolica here! If these packages work well for you, then just use them :) I don't have a lot of experience with using these tools, but the last time I tried the user experience isn't so great, because of lack of LSP support (no typing, autocomplete etc). It could have improved in the mean time. I believe the tools are also more oriented to polynomial algebra and no so much for manipulating general expressions.
Seems like a worthy successor to Sympy, although the license system might prevent it from reaching the same level of adoption.
No, being commercial prevents that. SymEngine is much more like that, and shares developers with SymPy: https://github.com/symengine/symengine, https://symengine.org/.