Introduction

matten is a developer-experience-first multidimensional array (tensor) library for Rust — the family car for learning, teaching, small numerical workflows, data exploration, and early prototypes.

Maturity labels in this book — such as production-ready — describe stability within that scope, not performance or scale. matten optimizes for time to first understanding and a runnable PoC, not benchmark leadership.

This book is organized by reader:

• New users — philosophy and a quick start.
• Playground — try broadcasting, reshape, axis reductions, and matmul in the browser, no install required: Playground.
• Reference — the rules that shape the public API.
• Contributors — project layout, milestones, and process.

This documentation tracks the current 0.48 release family. matmul and the axis reductions (sum_axis, mean_axis, min_axis, max_axis) are substantially faster on larger tensors. No numeric output changes — both are exact restructurings, verified bit-identical to the previous implementations rather than merely close. The published crates now carry a homepage link to the project book. See the [0.48.0] CHANGELOG entry for the complete list.