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> Seems like a really nice effort.

Does it? Another powerful calculating engine trapped behind a skeuomorph interface?

Here[1] is a really nice effort that, sadly, hasn't been updated in 14 years and only runs on Windows. It's a wonderful 606kB math REPL that can probably do everything DB48X can do, except it foregoes all the 1970's portable calculator nonsense, making it about a thousand times more useful.

I have a nascent clone of this written in Rust using egui and rug, that is currently stalled because -- on bleeping Windows -- the former has problems with MinGW the latter has problems with MSVC... which makes me want to tear my hair out. I wait, patiently, for egui to get their MinGW ducks in a row because I have no hope that the GMP/MPFR/MPC stack is ever going to work on MSVC in my lifetime.

[1] https://speqmath.com/

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> Does it? Another powerful calculating engine trapped behind a skeuomorph interface?

Yes, it does. This is not a calculator app. It's calculator firmware that happens to also be runnable in an app.

They're trying to cram a HP48ish calculator into an HP42 clone calculator body, while retaining much of the UX of the calculator they're replacing.

The HP42 is the direct successor of the HP41 without the hardware interfaces and gizmos. Its essentially software compatible with the 41.

The HP48 (and -28) are completely different animals, from ground up hardware redesign to the notable RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) foundations, and just in raw functionality as well. The 28/48 series had symbolic solvers and graphing (among a laundry list of other things), both novel at the time.

If you wanted an RPL based system in stand alone hardware with real buttons, you were stuck with legacy calculators. This fits in the modern DM42 system.

Calculator is for quick and dirty math in the field or in a lab, saving me from taking out the laptop from backpack or abandoning my optics alignment exercise and getting to the workstation on the other end of the table.

In other cases when I have convenient access to a computer, I'll use a proper math software like Matlab/Mathematica or whatever open source alternative. It's just a different use case.

Some newer terminal based implementation of something similar is Numbat [0], for example.

For a GUI calculator similar to seqmath, but cross platform, try speedcrunch [1].

[0]: https://numbat.dev/

[1]: https://heldercorreia.bitbucket.io/speedcrunch/

Thanks this is a great recommendation - runs perfect in Wine. There definitely seems to be a habit with developers making calculators that still fall into a 70s form factor. This is a great departure.

I really do want to clone that thing, except cross platform, and enhanced with 64 bit native math. I want the same exact REPL calculator and function library running natively and starting instantly from a no-install binary on every platform I might ever touch.

Oh, and make it open source, so that people that know more than I about all things math can contribute. If you hadn't noticed, SpeQ Math is not open source.

Is there a significant difference between that package and SageMath / XCas / Octave and friends? While a bit arcane, I've always been a great fan of xcas

Yes. SpeQ math, is extremely small, starts instantly and stands alone with no complex runtime.

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