HACKER Q&A
📣 yarapavan

What are some killer libraries for your language of choice?


Inspired by https://lobste.rs/s/h4j3lg/killer_libraries

A killer app is software that’s so good it justifies using specific hardware or operating system. By analogy, a killer library is a library so good it justifies using a specific programming language. Two examples:

* Ruby on Rails was so good for webdev at the time it justified using Ruby.

* Pandas is so good for datascience it justifies using Python.

Usually there are alternatives to the killer library in other languages, but they don’t catch on for one reason or another— usability, lack of critical features, etc. This can change over time. Arguably quickcheck could have been a killer library for Haskell, but now most languages have a decent PBT framework.

What are some killer libraries for your language of choice?

  👤 ggeorgovassilis Accepted Answer ✓
Answering this assumes knowing the competing ecosystems - I don't. I have been working in the Java ecosystem for over a decade and haven't had the urge to look for greener pastures. Libraries/frameworks that, if they went away, would make me look for a new ecosystem:

- JUnit (Unit testing)

- Mockito (stubbing)

- Selenium

- Spring (mostly for dependency injection, secondly for the many useful adapters)

- Hibernate (I'm off Hibernate now but there were times I couldn't do without it)

- Tomcat

- Cocoon (afaik dead now, but I've written massive applications with it)

- Swing (desktop apps used to be a thing when I was young)

👤 RangerScience
Sinatra.

You want something more than Wordpress and less than Rails? Sinatra.

👤 graderjs
simplepeer for WebRTC in browser and Node.JS. Reliable and simple!

pytorch I guess for python?

👤 pestatije
PBT: Property-based testing
👤 bradwood
ramda - JS
👤 noloblo
conduit haskell

yesod haskell

snap haskell

flask py3

rayon rust