Question

Does there exist a symbolic computation library written pure C? Symbolic computation as in manipulating mathematical equations in symbolic form.

I know there is Mathematica, and Sympy. But, I am interested in creating in a high performance pure C implementation of a symbolic computation library to bind to a scripting language, specifically Ruby to start.

It would seem that their is a need for a symbolic mathematics library such this. Over time, ideally the library could be built out in a similar manor to libgit2 where there is a central C implementation of the project and various implementations branched off for the purpose of creating bindings to other languages?

Answer 1

Have you taken a look at GAP? From its website:

GAP is a system for computational discrete algebra, with particular
emphasis on Computational Group Theory. GAP provides a programming
language, a library of thousands of functions implementing algebraic
algorithms written in the GAP language as well as large data libraries
of algebraic objects. See also the overview and the description of the
mathematical capabilities. GAP is used in research and teaching for
studying groups and their representations, rings, vector spaces,
algebras, combinatorial structures, and more. The system, including
source, is distributed freely. You can study and easily modify or
extend it for your special use.

According to its Wikipedia page, GAP is implemented in C, and the source code is freely available.