Hi all, Just to add a small perspective building on what Ralf mentioned.
One aspect I’ve found particularly interesting is how Sage positions itself more as an integration layer rather than a single tightly-coupled CAS. While this means Sage historically didn’t implement symbolic integration natively, the design choice pays off by allowing Sage to leverage mature systems like FriCAS for areas where they are strongest. In contrast, FriCAS/Axiom’s tightly integrated, strongly typed language enables very robust symbolic workflows (especially for integration), but this same design makes it harder to organically expand into broader areas like number theory, graph theory, or coding theory at scale. >From this angle, Sage’s interface-driven approach seems less like a limitation and more like a deliberate architectural trade-off: breadth and extensibility over specialization. The fact that Sage can expose FriCAS integration routines when needed makes the two systems feel more complementary than competitive. Happy to hear if others have seen this trade-off play out differently in practice. Best regards, Vishwas On Tue, 6 Jan, 2026, 10:13 pm Dima Pasechnik, <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Tuesday, January 6, 2026 at 6:04:05 AM UTC-6 Ralf Hemmecke wrote: > > On 1/6/26 10:51, 'Doris Behrendt' via sage-devel wrote: > > > I never heard of FriCAS. I just had a look at https:// > > fricas.sourceforge.net/history.html and some other webpages. I never > > heard of it tbh. > > The official website is eigther https://fricas.github.io or > https://fricas.org. > > Since you seem to be interested in guessing, look at > https://fricas.github.io/api/Guess.html and the respective article > https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0702086. > > A general comparison is hard to make. Since FriCAS grew out of AXIOM, it > it is a compact system that is strong in many areas, in particular > integration. A main ingredient of FriCAS is that it comes with a > strongly typed programming language that may detect wrong code already > at compile time. SAGE probably covers more areas by incorporating lots > of other open-source packages into a whole system. It's programming > language is Python (or Cython). > > > Sage certainly covers more maths areas than Axiom/FriCAS, and usually with > efficient implementations. > E.g. doing number theory or graph theory, or group theory, or coding > theory in Axiom/FriCAS isn't going to take you very far. > OTOH Sage never had its own symbolic integration, it merely provides > interfaces, whereas in Axiom/FriCAS it's > one of the areas where it excels. > > > > In fact, SAGE also has an interface to > FriCAS and allows to use the FriCAS integration routines from within SAGE. > > Maybe other people can add. > > Ralf > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/1c8b341a-f270-49e5-86b3-c58bc922089cn%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/1c8b341a-f270-49e5-86b3-c58bc922089cn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAPEXzoS0eiU6tSwWV82188GmcFH%2BBvKiLT6cbAtLvgy1E3M-Kg%40mail.gmail.com.
