Money libraries - which do you use and why?

I remember that kipcole9/money took much more time to compile and we replaced it with plain Decimal. Decimal — Decimal v3.1.1

I used elixirmoney/money also before and it just worked.

kipcole9/money takes more time to compile because of :cldr. As per the docs

Cldr attempts to maximise runtime performance at the expense of additional compile time.

When using just :decimal, did you find it hard to account for all of these: GitHub - ex-money/money: Elixir implementation of Money with Currency · GitHub Personally I am unable to bear the mental burden of keeping these things in mind when working with money so that’s why I use :ex_money, a.k.a. kipcole9/money.

Yepp, I read it. Our use case was quite simple, so we were fine.

My take is that the :money library is mostly providing a datatype, while :ex_money is a toolkit of dealing with money, especially in an internationalized fashion.

Some of those factors:

• Available currencies
  In :money the list of currencies is static/hardcoded and you can only add additional ones. :ex_money depends on :cldr for currencies instead of maintaining a list on it’s own and also has means for adding additional ones.
• Rounding rules (a.k.a. business rules of currencies)
  With :cldr in the back :ex_cldr does not only know the number of decimal places a currency uses, but also about things like alternate rounding rules, like when cash is supposed to round differently than e.g. accounting.
• Formatting
  :money does only support a single set of default formatting or customized per API call. :ex_money again uses :cldr to adjust formatting to settings matching a certain locale (like the users’).

So all in all it’s :ex_money for me if only for the fact of harnessing the knowledge of a unicode maintained database of those mentioned things as opposed to a library maintainer having a (likely worse) maintained copy of it.

This is a good summary of the main differences between the 2 libs.
I think this should be made clear in the Github READMEs of both libs.

I use GitHub - elixirmoney/money: Elixir library for working with Money safer, easier, and fun... Is an interpretation of the Fowler's Money pattern in fun.prog. · GitHub together with GitHub - jshmrtn/currency-conversion: Convert Money Amounts between currencies. · GitHub.

I also contributed to both. They are well written, actively maintained and the authors were helpful. What more do you need?

Thank you for contributing to the conversation (and to those libraries!).

For me, I like to keep my apps globally applicable, so I care about the use of :cldr and the ability to configure which locales/countries/currencies my app understands and can work with. Moreover, if you want to use cryptocurrencies, it behooves developers to be able to define their own custom currencies.

What I am looking for is for the community to confirm that one library is “more correct” or “more comprehensive” than the other. I believe, right now, that :ex_money, a.k.a. kipcole9/money is both more correct and comprehensive and yet has less stars and forks on Github (which might influence new Elixir devs).

Yes, I think the use of :cldr is an excellent point.

Every library can have its users, there does not have to be a more correct one. Is Phoenix the most correct web framework for Elixir?

With that in mind, I think the 2 libs should reference each other. A new Elixir dev visiting github would not know which lib to choose.

I’m sure the maintainers would appreciate a PR to the readmes (and maybe the docs) to include those references