A FOSS online graphing calculator inspired by Desmos

Project Source

In high school I loved, Desmos. It was great for visualizing problems in Trigonometry, and made some nice looking graphs. I loved how it let me dynamically view and transform mathematical expressions and learn a ton about modeling real world problems. I found though that as I went further into my education in math and science, and learning to code, Desmos felt increasingly limited. I found that it was inconvenient for working with arrays and vectors since it doesn’t have indexing. I also found that it was not free open-source software, and I decided I’d try and make my own version that addressed what I found limited desmos, and that was fully open-source and ran client-side. I named the project after Michael Faraday because of his use of visualizations to illustrate concepts in electromagnetism.

Project Summary

Faraday was a mix of wanting a piece of software to exist, and wanting to build my own skills while doing so. In that vein I ended up using three technologies relatively that were mostly new to me: TypeScript, React, and Haskell. It might have been a bad idea to use three new technologies for this project, but I since I only needed each technology for one step, so I decided it was fine. I used Haskell to parse the math syntax, inputted in a domain specific language I named mentat (I’ve been reading a lot of Dune), into executable JavaScript. This project made me fall in love with Haskell and functional programming in general, and was a great language for transpiring code. I then tried compiling the Haskell into web assembly so that I could import it into my TypeScript. I was not able to get the wasm compiled by the prototype GHC wasm compiler to work, so decided to pivot the project to being a webapp. I decided to make a flask server that receives mentat code from the frontend, and transpiles that into javascript. Then that is sent back to the user.

The frontend of Faraday is build in TypeScript and React, or at time of writing will be. I’m using react with MaterialUI for the interface, and konva to render the actual graph.