Slick VS Shapeless

Compare Slick vs Shapeless and see what are their differences.

Slick

Slick (Scala Language Integrated Connection Kit) is a modern database query and access library for Scala (by slick)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Slick Shapeless
17 13
2,637 3,363
0.2% -
8.7 7.4
7 days ago about 12 hours ago
Scala Scala
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License 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.

Slick

Posts with mentions or reviews of Slick. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-12.
  • How many people/companies are fully on Scala 3?
    4 projects | /r/scala | 12 Jul 2023
  • First Slick prerelease for Scala 3!
    2 projects | /r/scala | 9 Jul 2023
    Made a PR on slick to document this https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2760 (workaround is quite easy, you can just define def tupled = (apply _).tupled in the companion object of the case class and it will also compile for all Scala versions).
  • Sketch of a Post-ORM
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jun 2023
    The Scala ecosystem has a few ways to do composable type-safe query building, e.g. Slick[0] or more recently Quill[1]. . I believe both also have ways to do compile-time string interpolation (e.g. sql"""select * from users where id = ${user.id}""") which generate prepared statements (I know Slick does prepared statements. Quill has similar macros but I haven't looked into how safe they are to use).

    [0] https://scala-slick.org/

  • Slick 3.5.0-M3 has been released
    1 project | /r/scala | 30 Apr 2023
    Release notes at https://github.com/slick/slick/releases/tag/v3.5.0-M3
  • Database abstraction library which allows a clean domain model
    2 projects | /r/scala | 20 Jan 2023
    With all this in mind, I landed at the first candidate: slick from https://scala-slick.org/ that you all probably know.
  • Scala 3 migration: 7 benefits that outweigh the risks
    2 projects | /r/scala | 3 Nov 2022
    I think Slick's current priority is also getting in Scala 3 support: https://github.com/slick/slick/issues/2177
  • Slick 3.4.x is here!
    3 projects | /r/scala | 18 Sep 2022
    Future releases might not be announced here. To get notified, go to https://github.com/slick/slick, click the Watch dropdown button at the top, select Custom, check Releases, and click Apply.
  • Is there any good resource for learning Slick (3.x)?
    2 projects | /r/scala | 2 Sep 2022
    https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2097 now I use slightly lower version of slick so this might be an upgrade that resolves (I do recall using it in 21 and it was still buggy and I filed a ticket, which I cannot find at the moment), but given a complex enough query (we have one in PROD which has tons of flexibility in terms of filters that can be passed in) but it also makes for complex code.
  • Slick 3.4.0 is imminent
    2 projects | /r/scala | 16 Aug 2022
    I started writing a reply but then I realized it would be long and depends on exactly what you mean, so maybe it's better to post the question in https://github.com/slick/slick/discussions/categories/questions?
  • Scala: A Love Story
    4 projects | dev.to | 21 Apr 2021
    I purchased the very entertaining book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. Although I found Haskell fascinating and tempting, I knew it was unrealistic to introduce it in our company. Scala on the other hand looked like it could be the holy grail: All the characteristics I was looking for, no need to abandon the JVM and its cornucopia of tools and libraries, and the possibility for coexistence with Java and therefore incremental adoption. After implementing some simple programs to identify any immediate risks of committing to the language and its ecosystem, I started to introduce Scala in customer projects. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to work with open-minded, curious, and ambitious team members who were also experienced enough to appreciate the benefits of the language. We immediately applied our experience with functional programming, and embraced immutability. Libraries like Slick and Akka HTTP (we actually started out with its predecessor, Spray) made building database-backed REST services a breeze. And the resulting code was robust and highly maintainable. Scala's expressive type system and type inference made it easy to build a restrictive, consistent domain model without bloating the code. There was virtually no overhead. Any boilerplate could be easily abstracted out. In the end, the application code felt natural, concise and elegant. Programming was fun again.

Shapeless

Posts with mentions or reviews of Shapeless. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-06.
  • Question regarding Recursive datatypes and cats typeclasses (Haskell to Scala)
    3 projects | /r/scala | 6 Jul 2023
    Scala 2-only: * Shapeless (there is Shapeless for Scala 3 but less often needed as basic things are in Scala 3)
  • Is there the equivalent of this in Scala ? (Maps to Struct)
    1 project | /r/scala | 27 Dec 2022
    This is the FromMap typeclass in Shapeless. Note that there’s a companion syntax package for it providing .toRecord for any Map and an appropriately-structured Record (and a Record is the LabelledGeneric representation of a case class).
  • Scala 3: modifying product types in compile-time
    1 project | /r/scala | 14 Jul 2022
    If that's what you want, you can use Shapeless' records and HList. You can probably replicate this in plain Scala 3 with tuples and literal types as you said. It won't play nice with your others libs though but maybe there are integrations.
  • Does Scala have support for Dependent types?
    1 project | /r/scala | 19 Jun 2022
    See the Shapeless Sized example.
  • How does Scala's type system compare to TypeScript's? Is it as powerful?
    1 project | /r/scala | 19 Jun 2022
    Shapeless has Sized: https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless/blob/v2.3.9/core/src/main/scala/shapeless/sized.scala
  • Fp libraries that target scala 3 exclusively?
    5 projects | /r/scala | 22 Nov 2021
    I know that libraries like Scodec and shapeless were rewritten practically from scratch for Scala 3, taking advantage of the next syntax and internals, as well as protoquill - a Scala 3 implementation of Quill.
  • Delphi 11 Alexandria Has Been Released
    4 projects | /r/programming | 23 Sep 2021
    please show me something like this: https://akka.io/ or this: https://zio.dev/ or this: https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless
  • 6 Years of Professional Clojure
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Aug 2021
    That largely depends on the type system. Languages like Haskell and Scala which have much more powerful type systems than C/Java/Go/etc absolutely do allow you to do those sorts of things. It is a bit harder to wrap your head around to be sure and there are some rough edges, but once you get the hang of it you can get the benefits of static typing with the flexibility of dynamic typing. See https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless or a project that I've been working on a lot lately https://github.com/zio/zio-schema.
  • Scala3: Does it provide a simplified way of doing n-term generic parameters?
    2 projects | /r/scala | 6 Jun 2021
    Just use cats and use the apply syntax .mapN for this. Seriously. There isn't a way to do it without generating source code that I can see in the api. Scala 3's HList Tuples aren't like Shapeless 2's HLists and I can't figure out a way in the api to reduce the tuple members down from (A, B, C, D) into an E, generically, yet with Scala 3 poly functions, unlike what you could do in Shapeless 2 with HList
  • Scala: A Love Story
    4 projects | dev.to | 21 Apr 2021
    Scala has sparked a huge ecosystem of very high quality libraries (Cats, Scalaz, shapeless, to name but a few). I think a major reason for this is that Scala attracts developers who value the advantages of the JVM, but are fed up with the limitations of the Java programming language and understand the benefits of an expressive type system and functional programming.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Slick and Shapeless you can also consider the following projects:

doobie - Functional JDBC layer for Scala.

cats - Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming.

Quill - Compile-time Language Integrated Queries for Scala

magnolia - Easy, fast, transparent generic derivation of typeclass instances

ScalikeJDBC - A tidy SQL-based DB access library for Scala developers. This library naturally wraps JDBC APIs and provides you easy-to-use APIs.

Monocle - Optics library for Scala

Squeryl - A Scala DSL for talking with databases with minimum verbosity and maximum type safety

Scalaz - Principled Functional Programming in Scala

Clickhouse-scala-client - Clickhouse Scala Client with Reactive Streams support

Chimney - Scala library for boilerplate-free, type-safe data transformations

Sorm - A functional boilerplate-free Scala ORM

scala-newtype - NewTypes for Scala with no runtime overhead