What Wolfram provides

Wolfram released its engine (that is available for download). In particular, we collect the following references that have been useful to our work:

• WSTP (Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol): long a core enabling component of Wolfram systems, is the native protocol for transferring Wolfram Language symbolic expressions between programs.
• WSTPAPI: Extensively used within the Wolfram System itself, the Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol (WSTP) is the Wolfram System’s unique high-level symbolic interface standard for interprogram communication. With convenient bindings for a variety of languages, WSTP immediately allows arbitrary symbolic objects—representing data, programs, or any other construct—to be efficiently exchanged between programs, on one computer or across a heterogeneous network.
• WSTP C Language Functions: The WSTP library provides a collection of C language functions for interacting with the Wolfram Language via WSTP. These functions allow you not only to handle native C data types, but also to construct and deconstruct full Wolfram Language symbolic expressions.

What we provide

The official image¹ is only for the amd64 architecture, therefore any attempt to bind a foreign interface to libWSTP64i4.so fails if the user works in a different platform.

We make this possible providing an image for the arm64 architecture which has the corresponding library that can be used in your bindings via the C language. In particular, we have our own repository² from which we build two images for both the amd64³ and arm64⁴ architectures, respectively: both of them have in /home/wolframengine/dist both the wstp.h header and the libWSTP64i4.so shared library.

At the time of writing, it is not possible to use the executables wolframscript and wstpserver from the arm64 image because of licensing problems, therefore the user interested in running a Wolfram server and talk to it via its own bindings has to use the amd64 image. For this reason, we have the following rule in our Makefile⁵:

wstpserver:
	docker run -it --rm \
		--entrypoint /usr/local/Wolfram/WolframEngine/${WOLFRAM_VERSION}/SystemFiles/Links/WSTPServer/wstpserver \
		-v ./Licensing:/home/wolframengine/.WolframEngine/Licensing \
		-v ./wstpserver.conf:/home/wolframengine/wstpserver.conf \
		-p ${WOLFRAM_PORT_FORWARD}:${WOLFRAM_DEFAULT_PORT} \
		ghcr.io/massimo-nocentini/wolframengine.docker:${WOLFRAM_VERSION}-amd64 \
		-c /home/wolframengine/wstpserver.conf

that allows us to have a running process to interact via some bindings, provided that the free licence have been activated.