Mamba vs Shards
Mamba
mamba.readthedocs.ioShards
crystal-lang.orgSide by side
| Figure | Mamba | Shards |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 8.8 (#9) | 8.1 (#34) |
| Installation | The docs recommend installing Mamba through the Miniforge distribution, which comes with conda-forge preconfigured, and also document Miniforge Docker images. | Crystal packages and installation options are listed for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and other systems; Shards is usually distributed with Crystal or available as a separate package. |
| Purpose | Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments. | Shards is Crystal’s dependency manager for managing dependencies for Crystal projects and libraries. |
Plans
In their own words
Mamba
Mamba manages conda environments across Linux, macOS, Windows, API, and self-hosted setups. It creates and activates environments, installs packages, and runs commands inside them. It works with conda packages and supports most conda commands; its parallel downloads and libsolv solver speed package resolution. The framework includes the mamba command-line interface, the libmamba C++ library, micromamba, and Python bindings. Environment creation accepts text, Conda YAML, explicit, and conda-lock YAML specifications, and micromamba can install conda-lock files directly. The repoquery command searches repositories and can display direct, recursive, and reverse dependencies. Environments are self-contained prefixes that can manage native dependencies across programming languages. Mamba documents verification for package archives and extracted files, while repository index verification remains experimental. By default, it warns and asks for confirmation before transactions run package link scripts that can perform system operations. Mamba is free, open-source software under the BSD-3-Clause license, with lockfile support.