Simulacrum VS mdoc

The Cats ecosystem offers mature named abstractions providing algebraic laws virtually identical to those offered by Haskell and PureScript and that have stood the test of time, at the cost of relying on a "design pattern" approach to implementation you have to squint a bit to see ("typeclasses" based on higher-kinded types and implicit arguments) and that sometimes doesn't play nicely with Scala's colored local type inference. The selling point of this, coupled with parametricity ("tagless-final style"), is the ability to reason algebraically about your code.

Literally what scaladoc is, it comes with sbt. Although, it's better when enhanced with mdoc so that you get the standard microsite template like these. It would be nice to have an sbt serveDocs and if everyone would host their docs for external linking, but javadoc doesn't do that either.

The good news is that scaladoc is produced by default by sbt and published by default. So you can often pull it from the same repository your library jar came from, extract it with zip, and read the docs. But that's also totally unnecessary - javadoc.io allows you to put in your module info and serves the docs for you, so if there's an older version you can access the documentation this way. Rely on the type signatures, since they can't lie, whilst comments (including scaladoc comments) can. Honestly, library authors should be using mdoc and including examples on every public method, and that type of documentation is something you can almost always contribute to a project for a quick pr kudos.

I know it's not new but the "Snippet validation and results (mdoc)" features in mdoc are so cool. Really takes some of the tedium out of working with documentation since you can know that as you evolve your code the compiler will make sure you keep the docs in sync. Whole new level of Readme-Driven Development