This weekend, I stumbled across a relatively new site: Libraries.io. It’s a massive database of programming libraries, sorted by language, platform and license. As this is a large well from which to draw software development goodness, I thought we’d drop in a bucket and see what they had to offer.
A cursory glance through the stacks at Libraries.io shows that it’s a heavily Go-oriented store, with more than 132,000 Go libraries from which to choose. JavaScript comes in a close second with more than 122,000 libraries. There’s a giant drop off there, though, as Ruby in the third slot has just over 58,000 libraries.
One can probably attribute this to the fact that Ruby Gems takes care of the same problem Libraries.io does, and it does so more elegantly from within your Ruby installation.
When it comes to licenses, more than 171,000 of the libraries on Libraries.io are licensed under the MIT license. Sixty thousand are Apache 2.0, and the three versions of the GPL (2.0, 2.0+ and 3.0) accounted for just over 20,000 of the libraries.
But just what are all these libraries for? There’s an awful lot to choose from. There’s a popularity list, fortunately, so we can dive in and see, from a non-GitHub perspective, just what libraries people are using.
Top of the list is Mocha, a JavaScript test framework that brings unit testing into Node.js. CoffeeScript is quite popular on Libraries.io, as well; this JavaScript library simplifies the language and covers the rough edges, shortening code and giving developers an easier path to JavaScript competence.
Gulp, the streaming build system, was also popular on Libraries.io. Gulp speeds up build time for developers by favoring code over configuration, and by creating a replicable process for building and deploying software.
Despite the large number of Go libraries, JavaScript dominates the popular projects category. PHP framework Symfony, at No. 18, is the first non-JavaScript library on the list. PHPunit comes in at No. 20, rounding out the list.
What can we take away from this awesome site? Well, aside from having a great, curated list for developers looking for code to help themselves out, Libraries.io can be seen as a comforting reassurance that unit testing still matters to developers, and that JavaScript isn’t just growing out of control: Developers are trying their darnedest to make it easier to deal with from any angle.
