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Wolfram Engine: one small step for WR, one giant leap for developers

Posted 4 years ago

...Just found out about the release of the new, free Wolfram Engine offering. I'm interested in this initiative as the basis for developing commercial, embedded applications. I have read the license agreement and how it applies to both R&D/testing and for commercial distribution. I'm most interested in edge applications and thus the clauses which apply to embedded systems. Several questions come to mind but the three uppermost are:

  1. Are there standard, itemized commercial use cases that can be referred to regarding licensing fees rather than simply stating a range of 5 to 100 dollars per unit? I understand that this is new territory for Wolfram and probably still under discussion. But it would be useful to have more details.

  2. Although the RPi series of SBCs are popular and widely available, I have found element14 unresponsive when it comes to anything but stellar MOQs, especially restrictive for small startups. Nothing that a little competition couldn't cure. So it's in that spirit that I ask: does Wolfram intend to port the Wolfram Engine to more than just the RPi anytime soon(ish) or should one not hold his/her breath?

  3. Of a slightly more technical nature, how does (or will) the wolfram engine handle graphical output or even dynamic code/manipulation. Thank you.

Regards

2 Replies

I have an answer to your third question. The installation of the Wolfram Engine includes WolframPlayer which lets you do dynamic things like Manipulate or interact with 3D graphics. Export your dynamic/3D output as a notebook and open it with WolframPlayer.

Ciao Nicola, Thanks for replying. I know that a notebook (.nb) can be saved as a CDF but I've checked the standard Mathematica install in raspbian stretch and it seems that it doesn't come with CDF Player. So I'm assuming that I will have to download the installer for the new Wolfram Engine in order to get the CDF Player, as you suggest. Which begs the question, does the Wolfram Engine installer cater to the ARM-based RPi or just x86/amd64 Linux installs? Also, do you know if the player can be called from within a wolframscript session a-la-Tkinter in Python? I haven't yet tried it myself as I don't have access to my RPi because of travel obligations. Grazie!

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