A lone developer is rebuilding IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust
I'm Rewriting IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust, Alone
StatCraft is an open-source, clean-room statistical suite written entirely in safe Rust, with zero unsafe blocks and a no-panic guarantee. It covers descriptives, frequencies, t-tests, and one-way ANOVA, plus SPSS-style pivot tables and .sav file support. A built-in MCP bridge lets AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT drive analyses locally, so the LLM guides the inquiry while Rust does the math.
Large Language Models frequently hallucinate when processing thousands of numbers, calculating means, or estimating non-linear test statistics.
- Stitch4223
Alone? How do you achieve clean room reversing with one person?
You don’t state StatCraft is clean room, but all Artcraft software is.
Talk to a lawyer to check if you’re not wasting your time.
- throwaway63467
Does safety matter for this kind of software? It’s mostly internal tooling used by researchers and statisticians. I get it rust is cool but safety isn’t the prime concern here I think.
- uniqueuid
Sorry but the problem is not primarily software, it’s community, teaching and standardization.
We have R/tidyverse which does 90% of everything and has an amazing community and procedures eg. around documentation. For everything else you have excel or python. So I don’t see the use case.
- veggieroll
GNU PSPP [0] is what got me into free software after losing access to SPSS in the middle of writing my undergrad capstone.
I’ve long since switched to python & other normal programming for any stats needs. And I only ever scraped the surface of SPSS/PSPP anyways. But, I’d be interested to hear what PSPP doesn’t cover.
Good luck on your project.
- qubex
What’s wrong with PSPP?