cats VS ZIO

Compare cats vs ZIO and see what are their differences.

cats

Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming. (by typelevel)
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cats ZIO
43 59
5,153 3,980
0.8% 0.8%
8.9 9.5
6 days ago 3 days ago
Scala Scala
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
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.
  • Which functional programming language should I learn?
    5 projects | /r/functionalprogramming | 28 Oct 2022
    3) Finally, Scala 3 + cats is a great middle ground. It's a great language to teach and learn FP, even if you learn by yourself, without support from other people. There are lots of materials and even if you get stuck with a concept, you can still implement it using what you knew before.

ZIO

Posts with mentions or reviews of ZIO. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-11.
  • The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
  • I had a great experience with Scala and hopefully it will get more popular
    10 projects | /r/scala | 11 Jul 2023
    scala has 2 healthy and pretty complete lib ecosystems : check out typelevel and ZIO. Both are FP oriented, which might not be your cup of tea at first glance but I would encourage you to try em out ! Softest introduction would be to start with the typelevel cats library and build up from there. The excellent Scala with Cats will ease you softly into an FP mindset. It's a bit dated and for scala 2 only but translating to Scala 3 is a very good exercise if you feel so inclined !
  • Is it prudent to use Scala for anything new?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jun 2023
    Last but not least, Scala is currently the language with one of the best effect systems in my opinion (https://zio.dev/). Kotlin for example has copied the approach with https://arrow-kt.io/ which I think is great actually. But when comparing Scala and Kotlin here, Scala wins by a large margin, it is a completely different world. It's like building a highly concurrent system in Erlang vs C.

    Of course, if you don't want to learn things like union types, traits/typeclasses and effects (similar to async/await but more powerful) you will be annoyed by Scala. But once you learned them, you can never go back.

  • How to get started?
    4 projects | /r/scala | 2 Jun 2023
    ZIO
  • Reconnecting with Scala. What's new?
    7 projects | /r/scala | 24 May 2023
    Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html
  • Is Parallel Programming Hard, and, If So, What Can You Do About It? [pdf]
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Feb 2023
    I use ZIO (http://zio.dev) for Scala which makes parallel programming trivial.

    Wraps different styles of asynchronicity e.g. callbacks, futures, fibers into one coherent model. And has excellent resource management so you can be sure that when you are forking a task that it will always clean up after itself.

    Have yet to see anything that comes close whilst still being practical i.e. you can leverage the very large ecosystem of Java libraries.

  • 40x Faster! We rewrote our project with Rust!
    5 projects | /r/rust | 30 Jan 2023
    The one advantage Rust has over Scala is that it detects data races at compile time, and that's a big time saver if you use low level thread synchronization. However, if you write pure FP code with ZIO or Cats Effect that's basically a non-issue anyway.
  • What’s so great about functional programming anyway?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2022
    > It's a weakness of functional programming, not the language.

    I would strongly object this.

    Have you seen ZIO?

    https://zio.dev/

  • Switching career from F# to scala
    2 projects | /r/scala | 24 Oct 2022
    But overall, I'm happier with Scala. It has not one, but two lively FP communities. I recommend that you pick one of them: ZIO or TypeLevel (Cats Effect, fs2, http4s, ...). To some extent, you can mix TypeLevel libraries in ZIO projects.
  • New to Scala;
    8 projects | /r/scala | 14 Oct 2022

What are some alternatives?

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

cats-effect - The pure asynchronous runtime for Scala

Scalaz - Principled Functional Programming in Scala

Shapeless - Generic programming for Scala

Monix - Asynchronous, Reactive Programming for Scala and Scala.js.

Http4s - A minimal, idiomatic Scala interface for HTTP

Vert.x - Vert.x is a tool-kit for building reactive applications on the JVM

fs2-kafka - Functional Kafka Streams for Scala

Reactor-Scala-Extensions - A scala extension for Project Reactor's Flux and Mono

Scala.Rx - An experimental library for Functional Reactive Programming in Scala

RxScala - RxScala – Reactive Extensions for Scala – a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences

ScalaTest - A testing tool for Scala and Java developers

Monocle - Optics library for Scala