Writing a Mathematica Interpreter in Typescript

Hey, that's my project!

I just wrote another post about perf benchmarking it against Mathematica proper-- 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.

> 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]]

  bif[n_] := 0

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