Use kiwi.js instead of Cassowary?

[JobLeonard]

Cassowary.js hasn't been updated in years.

When someone commented on that in the github repo, the maintainers themselves suggested kiwi.js for an alternative faster implementation:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/kiwi.js

Not that I think that Cassowary is currently a bottleneck, but if the API is identical and it doesn't introduce new bugs, then why not get the free performance boost? And at least there is a chance any bugs encountered will be fixed.

[mbebenita]

@JobLeonard thanks for the tip, I hadn't come across this implementation.

[ollelauribostrom]

Gave kiwi.js a try this weekend. For the most part, the API is the same but there are some differences which made me fail in swapping out this dependency.

I could not find any kiwi.js equivalence for:

• solver.addStay(...)
• Cassowary.Equation(..)
• Cassowary.Inequality(..)

However, i'm not too familiar with the solving algorithm. Does @mbebenita know if there are any way around those differences?

[mreinstein]

Does @mbebenita know if there are any way around those differences?

You could submit improvements to kiwi.js directly :) My impression is the maintainer is approachable, responsive, and reasonable from my limited interactions.

[mreinstein]

All 3 of the aforementioned bullets have equivalents in kiwi.js see IjzerenHein/kiwi.js#17 for details on these.

Also, shameless plug, if you're looking for something a little higher level where you can specify a set of equations as a string, I wrote/maintain constraint-solver npm module, which layers on top of the latest kiwi.js: https://github.com/mreinstein/constraint-solver