Metals VS cats

Compare Metals vs cats and see what are their differences.

Metals

Scala language server with rich IDE features 🚀 (by scalameta)

cats

Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming. (by typelevel)
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Metals cats
18 43
2,020 5,171
1.1% 0.8%
9.8 8.9
7 days ago 5 days ago
Scala Scala
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

Metals

Posts with mentions or reviews of Metals. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-24.
  • 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
  • Tmux, NeoVim, etc. to write pure Kotlin code?
    2 projects | /r/Kotlin | 30 Apr 2023
    You might want to look at Scala, they have proper LSP support with metals which means you can write your code in vscode, neovim, emacs, or even fleet (the new jetbrains text editor).
  • New plugin to support LSP file operations
    6 projects | /r/neovim | 9 Jan 2023
    Please write in the comments if you know of any language servers I should test it with. Currently I tested only metals and rust-analyzer.
  • Why are all the guides on using LSP functionality full of bloat?
    3 projects | /r/neovim | 26 Dec 2022
    If you are using nvim-lspconfig you can pass the settings as a Lua table to the setup function. For example, here are may metals settings:
  • Type-Signature.com
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Nov 2022
  • What is the one thing you need everyday to make your job easier?
    2 projects | /r/AskMen | 16 Oct 2022
    Bazel support in Metals. I didn't spend all that time figuring out and adjusting Emacs/Spacemacs and making my workflow (almost) mouse-free just to scrap my config and switch to IDEA's rodent infested ways.
  • Scala 2.13.9 is here
    3 projects | /r/scala | 21 Sep 2022
    There is one small issue involving code completion returning inappropriate completions in some cases; https://github.com/scalameta/metals/pull/4414 will fix it, once it's included in a release. Perhaps that's the PR you saw?
  • Scala Isn't Fun Anymore
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2022
    It is, by quite a bit.

    While the "Scala IDE" project is dead for all practical purposes, IntelliJ IDEA's Scala plugin is actually pretty amazing. There's also a VisualStudio plugin that does pretty much the same and is advancing by leaps and bounds. There are also interconnecting projects that provide i.e. language server or build server that are reused by other projects. It's pretty modular. Metals (https://scalameta.org/metals/) is amazing.

    In general the language has become a wee bit faster to build, there was good progress with build times during the 2.12/2.13 cycles.

    With Scala3 the language got a bit simpler; concepts that were implemented explicitly using (hehe) implicits got their own keywords and a lot of the opinionated boilercode that cause a lot of debates is now generated during complication and hidden. A lot of "standardization" has occurred.

  • A Python-compatible statically typed language erg-lang/erg
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Aug 2022
  • Starting with Scala: editor and version choice?
    1 project | /r/scala | 7 Jun 2022
    IntelliJ has its own BSP. The other one is Metals. You can use it with many IDEs (vim, emacs, vscode, atom,...). Use it with emacs if you're comfortable with it.

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

What are some alternatives?

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

intellij-plugins - Open-source plugins included in the distribution of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and other IDEs based on the IntelliJ Platform

Scalaz - Principled Functional Programming in Scala

Jupyter Scala - A Scala kernel for Jupyter

Shapeless - Generic programming for Scala

sbt - sbt, the interactive build tool

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

bloop - Bloop is a build server and CLI tool to compile, test and run Scala fast from any editor or build tool.

ScalaTest - A testing tool for Scala and Java developers

Scalastyle - scalastyle

Monocle - Optics library for Scala

scalajs-benchmark - Benchmarks: write in Scala or JS, run in your browser. Live demo:

Scala Async - An asynchronous programming facility for Scala