New features of FORM

TL;DR

FORM Version 3 delivers a comprehensive revamp of a high‑performance symbolic manipulation system, emphasizing dynamic resource management, powerful preprocessor capabilities, and richer term-level workflows to handle large quantum-field-theory computations. It introduces numerous new features (variable buffers, recursive preprocessor constructs, advanced pattern matching, term and bracket environments, and topology-aware optimizations) while maintaining speed and portability. The paper also discusses a parallelization effort, with prototype MPI-based distribution and plans for thread-based approaches, aiming to accelerate large-scale calculations such as those in Mincer and harmonic-sum packages. Finally, FORM 3 is released as a free distribution with extensive packages, tutorials, and documentation to foster adoption and community-driven development.

Abstract

Version 3 of FORM is introduced. It contains many new features that are inspired by current developments in the methodology of computations in quantum field theory. A number of these features is discussed in combination with examples. In addition the distribution contains a number of general purpose packages. These are described shortly.