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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I’m a Mathematica addict and (as I have remarked elsewhere) rely predominantly on iPads as my platform of choice. Sure, Wolfram Online works fine when a network connection is available, but I’m really, really, really hoping that sooner rather than later they’ll release a fully fledged notebook & back-end kernel version of Mathematica for the iPad.

This shows some flexibility on their behalf, but it’s moving in the wrong direction (as far as I’m concerned, at least).

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I would say that porting Mathematica to the iPad would require them to be able to run the Mathematica engine on iPadOS. And with the strict rules Apple has around arbitrary code execution I would highly doubt that is going to happen.

That’s actually a misconception: Apple has allowed interpreted languages (e.g. Python, as in Pythonista) to tun on iOS/iPadOS for several years now. The Wolfram Language is definitely an interpreted language and therefore would not fall afoul of their rules.

It's also a multi-gigabyte installation full of Java, C, and Wolfram code. It is huge....so I'm sure there are some difficulties.

I have been using the engine for almost a year since they announced it. Without the notebook interface, it's only 1.6 GB.

    $ du -h -d3 pkg/Wolfram/
    3.1M    pkg/Wolfram/WolframScript/bin
    3.1M    pkg/Wolfram/WolframScript
    5.0K    pkg/Wolfram/man/man1
    5.5K    pkg/Wolfram/man
     13K    pkg/Wolfram/doc/wolframscript
     14K    pkg/Wolfram/doc
     40K    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/Executables
     30M    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/AddOns
    1.6G    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/SystemFiles
     10K    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/Configuration
    1.6G    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0
    1.6G    pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine
    1.6G    pkg/Wolfram/

Other people below are showing 6-8 GB on their systems, so it's lower than what I recall, but still higher than your figure I would normally bet. Are you only counting 1.6 once?

What do you mean? Should I count 1.6 multiple times?

I just realized that this number is after ZFS compression. Here is the apparent size,

    $ du -h -A -d3 pkg/Wolfram/
    5.0M pkg/Wolfram/WolframScript/bin
    5.0M pkg/Wolfram/WolframScript
    8.5K pkg/Wolfram/man/man1
    9.0K pkg/Wolfram/man
     16K pkg/Wolfram/doc/wolframscript
     16K pkg/Wolfram/doc
     30K pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/Executables
     46M pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/AddOns
    2.9G pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/SystemFiles
    2.0K pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0/Configuration
    3.0G pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine/12.0
    3.0G pkg/Wolfram/WolframEngine
    3.0G pkg/Wolfram/

Actually the downloaded file is a little over 1 GB,

    $ stat -f "%z %N"  Downloads/WolframEngine_12.0.0_LINUX.sh   
    1177035547 Downloads/WolframEngine_12.0.0_LINUX.sh

> It's also a multi-gigabyte installation full of Java, C, ...

Sounds like the Facebook app.

I think people are okay with gigabyte apps now.

Yeah, but it is like 15-20 GB if I recall correctly. It's been a few years, but I was like daaaaang.

Nah, it's around 8GB that can be trimmed to ~5GB if some example files and graphs are deleted from the documentation.

It is about 6GB on my linux system.

The fact that they’ve “tidied up” their command-line release (somewhat) raises my hopes by a marginal amount.

Regarding running the engine on iOS: Technically they do that now with their Wolfram Player App on the iOS. The calculations are done on the iPad and not sent to a server like the Wolfram Cloud app.

Per the App Store Review Guidelines:

> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps.

That seems to be saying updates should go through the app store, rather than blithely downloading and running random bits of code.

It doesn't rule out something like Pythonista (which is great!) that lets you write/run your own code (which doesn't change the app itself).

Oh, yes, please. The iPad (especially the Pro ones) is such an incredible machine — thin, light, fantastic battery life, and faster than most laptops. It would run Mathematica really, really well.

It would be an amazing platform. It almost pains me that the inherent potential is not (yet) realised.

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