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Benchmarks

matten keeps a small, reproducible benchmarking and positioning program (RFC-049). Its goal is to describe matten’s position honestly and with evidence, not to win a performance contest.

The program answers questions like:

  • What is matten good at?
  • Where is it intentionally simpler?
  • Where is it slower but acceptable?
  • Where would performance become a blocker?
  • How much code does a user write to solve small problems?

It deliberately does not claim that matten replaces ndarray, nalgebra, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, or Candle. matten is a small, approachable, Tensor-centered Rust numeric crate for PoC, learning, and small workflows; the benchmarks exist to make that position legible.

Current status

The benchmark program is staged.

  • Phase 1 — internal Rust baseline: implemented and accepted. A benchmark harness (benchmarks/, kept outside the workspace and unpublished); a core micro set and five scenario workloads drawn from the examples; a peak-RSS memory note on Linux; and an accepted internal baseline report.
  • Phase 2 — Rust peer comparison (ndarray/nalgebra): complete and accepted. The official peer comparison was filled from a maintainer run on the baseline’s machine class and accepted by architect ruling on 2026-06-25. Peer tasks are opt-in behind the peers feature (off by default).

Still deferred (designed in RFC-049, not yet implemented/authorized):

  • Phase 3 — ecosystem reference comparison (NumPy/Pandas), script-driven;
  • Phase 4 — regression tracking policy and hard thresholds/gates.

Two paths, depending on what you need:

  • Just want the results? → Results — a curated, readable summary of the latest numbers (Phase 1 internal baseline and Phase 2 peer comparison), with the “positioning, not ranking” framing. This is the reader’s page.
  • Need to regenerate or extend the benchmarks? → Methodology for what is measured and the rules that keep the program honest, then the harness README.md in benchmarks/ for the maintainer path: the environment-capture snippet and the exact cargo bench … commands under How to regenerate (with environment capture).

The full reports (complete tables, environment, regeneration commands) live in benchmarks/reports/.