HydroPortailStats
France's national flood statistics, ported out of Fortran and into R.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
Biome vs ggdist
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Biome and ggdist — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Biome vs ggdist: at a glance
What is Biome?
Biome's weekly patches keep widening past JavaScript, with Tailwind the deepest thread.
Biome ships a 2.5.x patch roughly weekly, each carrying a handful of nursery rules and a long tail of formatter and parser fixes. The rule set now reaches well past JavaScript — CSS, HTML, Svelte, Vue, Astro and Tailwind all get attention inside a single release. Type-aware rules remain the expensive part, and their performance is tuned in nearly every patch.
What is ggdist?
The grammar of uncertainty visualization, now drawing the uncertainty in its own estimates.
ggdist supplies ggplot2 with a compositional vocabulary for distributions — slabs, intervals, dotplots and the sub-geometries that combine them. The last three years moved it from a drawing library to an estimation library: bounded density estimation with Sheather-Jones bandwidth became the default, weights propagate through every density, interval and point summary, and blurred dotplots render Monte Carlo standard error as visual fuzz. The 2025 release rounds this out with per-geometry thickness subscales and settable global defaults.
Biome vs ggdist: editorial side-by-side
Biome
5.0INFRA · APIS
Biome's weekly patches keep widening past JavaScript, with Tailwind the deepest thread.
◆ Current state
Biome ships a 2.5.x patch roughly weekly, each carrying a handful of nursery rules and a long tail of formatter and parser fixes. The rule set now reaches well past JavaScript — CSS, HTML, Svelte, Vue, Astro and Tailwind all get attention inside a single release. Type-aware rules remain the expensive part, and their performance is tuned in nearly every patch.
◆ Where it's heading
Two expansions run at once: the languages Biome understands, and the depth of its Tailwind class parser, which has gone from flagging arbitrary values to parsing container-query variants, combinator selectors, bare-utility modifiers and the legacy important marker. Nursery is the staging area, and rules are accumulating there faster than they graduate. The HTML formatter is still absorbing whitespace edge cases, which is where a formatter earns the trust to be run on write.
◆ Prediction
The Tailwind parser work is close to supporting a coherent class sorting and linting story rather than isolated rules, and the nursery backlog will need a graduation pass before the next minor.
ggdist
0.0INFRA · APIS
The grammar of uncertainty visualization, now drawing the uncertainty in its own estimates.
◆ Current state
ggdist supplies ggplot2 with a compositional vocabulary for distributions — slabs, intervals, dotplots and the sub-geometries that combine them. The last three years moved it from a drawing library to an estimation library: bounded density estimation with Sheather-Jones bandwidth became the default, weights propagate through every density, interval and point summary, and blurred dotplots render Monte Carlo standard error as visual fuzz. The 2025 release rounds this out with per-geometry thickness subscales and settable global defaults.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads run in parallel and keep converging. One is statistical: pluggable density estimators arrived first, then became the default, then gained weights and quantile histograms. The other is compositional: sub-geometries acquired their own guides, then their own scales, so a slab's thickness axis is now a first-class annotated dimension. Cadence has stretched from twice-yearly to roughly annual, with the recent work tightening existing surface rather than opening new.
◆ Prediction
Subguides gained subscales a release later, so the remaining asymmetry is in the sub-geometry system rather than the statistics; expect the next release to continue that fill-in work.
Alternatives to Biome and ggdist
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Biome or ggdist.
bsvarSIGNs
Sign, zero and narrative restrictions brought into the bsvars ecosystem.
estimatr
Fast design-based estimators for experiments, coasting on CRAN patches.
ipaddress
IP address vectors for R that hit 1.0 and then went quiet.
ltertools
A column-key toolkit for stitching decades of ecological field data into one table.
finnts
Microsoft's automated forecasting framework, still mostly a one-maintainer effort.
See all Biome alternatives → · See all ggdist alternatives →
Recent activity from Biome and ggdist
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 16h agoBiomeTailwind parser deepens; five nursery rules land
- 7d agoBiomeReact Compiler rule lands; HTML style attributes lint as CSS
- 14d agoBiomeTailwind arbitrary values and noExtendNative join the rule set
- 21d agoBiomenoMisusedPromises performance regression fixed
- 28d agoBiomeBigint switch cases fixed; partial-type diagnostics suppressed
- 1mo agoBiomeAccessibility fixes; noCommentText autofix no longer hangs
- 1y agoggdistPer-geometry thickness subscales and settable defaults
- 2y agoggdistBlurred dotplots draw Monte Carlo error; weights reach every estimator ⚡
- 2y agoggdistC++ dotplot binning and safer bandwidth fallbacks
- 3y agoggdistBounded density becomes the default; existing charts change ⚡
- 3y agoggdistCategorical distributions, hex layouts, pluggable density estimators
- 4y agoggdistComputed variables shared across sub-geometries
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Biome and ggdist?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Biome is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Biome better than ggdist?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Biome is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Biome?
Top Biome alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Biome alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/biome for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggdist?
Top ggdist alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggdist alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggdist for the full list with editorial commentary on each.