ECL Runs Maxima in a Browser | Hacker News Reader

ECL Runs Maxima in a Browser

mailman3.common-lisp.net

119 pointsseansh12 comments

Very cool! Love to see old but still useful GPL licensed FSF projects. I had Maxima on my old Lisp Machine, and 24 years ago when I first interviewed at Google, one of the developers of Maxima was also interviewing and we had a while to talk in the sign in area before going off for our interviews. We were amused that two old Common Lispers were at the same place at the same time.

When you try the linked browser web app, start with the documentation link, fairly easy to use.

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42853528

There used to be an ECL+Maxima app for Android, but it fell in one of the purges of older programs from the Play store a while back. I was always surprised it didn't use ABCL.

Some folks have such a Java allergy that they rather endure the pains of NDK tooling, than accept a bit of Java on their efforts, I imagine.

Where the sad truth is that just the debugging features of the JDK alone make it worth using it even for just using C libraries. You can separate the C libraries, restart them without losing memory, communicate with them at least as efficient as through RPC ...

Memory management means that you can just inspect any piece of memory, even through code.

AND it's statically typed, unlike the one other environment that even tries to do this.

I think it is more of JVM thing than Java only. Maybe because of enterprise scale, rather than being resource aware minimalist solution.

ABCL is really slow.

I wouldn't assume ABCL runs on Android. It's not listed as a supported runtime on their website.

This looks like an open source alternative to Mathematica/MathLab/Maple running in the browser.

Please correct me if I'm off...

As there's no project description that I quickly found, I came to this conclusion myself.

Wikipedia writes: Maxima is based on a 1982 version of Macsyma

Perhaps because it has such a long history and because this was published in a Lisp website, Maxima was considered known.

>> This looks like an open source alternative to Mathematica/MathLab/Maple running in the browser.

Yes. If you're on Linux try out wxMaxima as a local app. I'm not sure how to get the Windows version of wxMaxima since you end up in some weird sourceforge hell trying to get an installer.

Prof. Jaime Villate taught us physics at U. Porto and made heavy use of Maxima. Good times :D

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