cats VS Laminar

Compare cats vs Laminar and see what are their differences.

cats

Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming. (by typelevel)
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cats Laminar
43 26
5,171 711
0.8% -
8.9 8.3
3 days ago about 1 month ago
Scala Scala
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

cats

Posts with mentions or reviews of cats. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-05.
  • Beware of teammates who refactor code based on personal taste without proper documentation or completeness. Sounds familiar.
    2 projects | /r/programming | 5 Jul 2023
    A functional programming library: https://typelevel.org/cats/
  • Is Scala worth learning in 2023?
    5 projects | /r/scala | 29 Jun 2023
    Learn something that pays the bill first - nowadays it's Golang/Rust react/typescript. Then you can try some pure fp libs like fp-ts and fp-core.rs, and look through existing scala cats docs. If you'll feel bad about it - that's totally fine and expectable, fp takes a paradigm shift and not that many dev able to shift their brains way of thought due to basic psychological rigidity) (inability to change habits and to modify concepts/attitudes once developed). And that's purely a staffing and management issue - folks hired randoms out of the blue, and called 'em a team.
  • Going into year 2 of Software Development Foundation Degree, have a particular liking for OOP and SQL, any tips, info or pointers on where to go from there?
    2 projects | /r/cscareerquestions | 29 May 2023
    I'm sorry, but have you ever done functional programming for a real company, like in a functional programming language like Haskell, Scala, or F#? Have you ever used Scala cats or scalaz? Have you ever learned category theory and how to apply its abstractions in software? Listen u/judethedude2106 this person hasn't gone as far down the functional programming rabbit hole as I have. Beyond learning the basics like the difference between pure and impure functions, what are closures, what higher order functions are and the most common ones like .map, .filter, and .flatmap, the immutable collections like immutable linked lists and trees, and what a Monad is and common monads like those used for futures/promises, async programming, and Option (Some or None, which is used instead of null checking), the more advanced functional programming stuff like category theory based abstractions are totally useless for real jobs and is just a giant time suck. Don't waste years on functional programming, spend at most a few months on it and no more.
  • rsmonad: Monads in stable Rust (+ Applicative, Alternative, Functor, Monoid, ...)
    2 projects | /r/rust | 24 May 2023
    As a former functional programmer in Scala, please do not go deep into the Category Theory programming. Scala has libraries like this one called "Cats", a cute shortened name for "Category Theory", but code that makes heavy use of these constructs is not understandable to other programmers. Other than using Monads as a design pattern for things like Options (which can be "Some" or "None"), Futures or Promises (which is used for asynchronous programming), and a few other things, please do not make heavy use of category theory constructs in real programming projects that will have other developers working on them. It is a rabbit hole that may be fun but is not super practical. Sure, write pure functions without side effects, but do not use the words "Bimonad", "Invariant Monoidal", and "Semigroup" in your code. The most common, practical application/use of functional programming is basic things like closures, .map, .filter, maybe chaining maps with like a .flatmap or whatever your programming language uses instead of chain or flatmap, and SQL that uses keywords like WHERE which can be represented in code by using a call to .filter. Like the place where these constructs are used most is in data processing like with SQL, ETL (Extract Transform, Load) jobs, Java's MapReduce on Hadoop, Scala's Apache Spark, and other data processing type things. Haskell is not a popular programming language in real world projects for a number of reasons and one of them is the heavy and sometimes impractical use of Category Theory.
  • Tmux, NeoVim, etc. to write pure Kotlin code?
    2 projects | /r/Kotlin | 30 Apr 2023
    At a previous job of mine we actually had an entirely pure Scala ecosystem using cats which instead uses typeclasses, referential transparency, and other FP concepts as the foundations for how to code. So a lot of flexibility to the language.
  • [E => *] Type
    2 projects | /r/scala | 9 Mar 2023
    Thanks! It's used heavily here
  • for comprehension and some questions
    3 projects | /r/scala | 22 Jan 2023
  • Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2023
    I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

    Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

    Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

    I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

    1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

    2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

  • yet another post about type classes in Scala
    2 projects | dev.to | 2 Jan 2023
    Our second type class example attempted to illustrate one last perk: type safety at compile time. It did so with a simplified example of the cats core library for type safety equality comparison between objects. If you're not familiar with cats, go ahead and give it go.
  • What are the design principles of Cargo?
    1 project | /r/rust | 1 Dec 2022

Laminar

Posts with mentions or reviews of Laminar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-23.
  • Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    My quite niche open source project broke this threshold last year, via Github sponsorships. Of course, I put a lot of time into it, so it's not "passive income" or even "market rate income", but still, without these sponsorships I wouldn't be able to work on it so much.

    The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev

  • The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
  • Why would users avoid a library that makes heavy use of macros in Scala 3?
    1 project | /r/scala | 5 Dec 2023
    I've noticed that Laminar and the newly released Kyo point that they don't use a lot of macros as a feature. Laminar says "Easy to understand: no macros", while Kyo emphasizes "Note: defer is currently the only macro in Kyo. All other features use regular language constructs." It seems that using less macros is something library users will like.
  • Is there any book or course about Scala front-end development?
    1 project | /r/scala | 10 Oct 2023
    https://laminar.dev/ might be what you need. Though I wish there was a more beginner friendly (I'm not from front-end world) tutorial for me to follow along.
  • Designing an HTML Component system
    3 projects | /r/scala | 11 May 2023
    Have you looked at Laminar and Tyrian? Especially Tyrian seems to be close to what you're looking for.
  • The Quest for the Ultimate GUI Framework
    4 projects | /r/programming | 22 Apr 2023
    For Scala there is Laminar, which has an even flashier website with nice docs. I haven't tested it out though, as I have never used Scala.
  • Solid like scala library that has more powerful reactive primitives and lean syntax?
    1 project | /r/solidjs | 18 Mar 2023
    I found this scala library called Laminar which looks super similar to solid. They use signals and has no virtual dom. State changes are represented by signals and events by event streams. Thus they seems to have feature parity with RXJS as they can model all sorts of async stuff. Best part is they get to keep writing their markup in C-style syntax than XML based JSX. It looks super elegant,minimalist and has type safety.
  • Solid JS compared to svelte?
    2 projects | /r/solidjs | 17 Mar 2023
    This is very true. I really hate svelte single file components. But then I tried JSX for breaking things down. I love solid but I don't feel really good about angle brackets within C style syntax. I saw this Scala library that stick with simple statically typed function syntax than html tags. I don't understand why people still wants to stick with xml like tags. In laminar markup is written like this scala div( h1("Hello world", color := "red"), inputCaption, input(inputMods, name := "fullName"), div( ">>", button("Submit"), "<<" ) ) I wish solid team makes their HyperScript syntax as performant as JSX.
  • Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Feb 2023
    Laminar (Scala framework) hasn't been mentioned yet so dropping it here as an awesome framework that support HTML-over-the-wire. It can be used together with React, HTMX, and many other frontend frameworks -- but doesn't have to be.

    https://laminar.dev/

  • 10 Years of Scala.js
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2023
    Scala.js core itself, which I maintain, does not need much innovation. We support all of Scala, and interact with any JavaScript library. That's what the core promises.

    If you want to compare to Scala 3, it's worth pointing out that you can use Scala.js with any Scala version >= 2.12.2. In particular, you can use it with Scala 3 and benefit from all its innovations. ;)

    Innovation comes mainly from libraries, notably UI libraries. Laminar (https://laminar.dev/) is a great example.

    In terms of roadmap, we are mostly working on "boring" stuff: improving performance (of the generated code, and of the linker), fixing bugs when they get reported, etc.

    Perhaps, when Wasm gets more features for deeper interoperability with JavaScript (manipulating objects notably), we will take another look at targeting Wasm. People usually expect all languages to target Wasm now, "because it's fast". Truth is, it's fast for languages with linear memory. There is no evidence yet that it will be fast for memory-managed languages with objects and virtual dispatch.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing cats and Laminar you can also consider the following projects:

Scalaz - Principled Functional Programming in Scala

OutWatch - The Functional and Reactive Web-Frontend Library for Scala.js

Shapeless - Generic programming for Scala

tyrian - Elm-inspired Scala UI library.

ZIO - ZIO — A type-safe, composable library for async and concurrent programming in Scala

Binding.scala - Reactive data-binding for Scala

ScalaTest - A testing tool for Scala and Java developers

Udash - Scala framework for building beautiful and maintainable web applications.

Monocle - Optics library for Scala

scalajs-react - Facebook's React on Scala.JS

Scala Async - An asynchronous programming facility for Scala

slinky - Write Scala.js React apps just like you would in ES6