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.
• Reference — the rules that shape the public API.
• Contributors — project layout, milestones, and process.

This documentation tracks the current 0.37 release family, an RFC-071 local visualization-artifact release that adds private fixed-demo JSON output for matten-report without changing public APIs, published dependencies, core runtime behavior, or maturity labels.