Crystal 1.22

sumnole

For those that don't know: Crystal is like a typed Ruby with the performance and concurrency flow of Go.

Primer81

what does this language excel at in particular? havent heard of it before and didnt find a clear use case / mission statement on the webpage. unless I'm missing where to find it. just curious to learn more.

pelcg

Is Crystal even relevant at all now? It isn't interoperable with Ruby and I don't know of any reputable companies using Crystal. It just looks like Ruby, but it isn't Ruby and it is a compiled language? OK? I am not sure why I should learn this language?

pelagicAustral

Fast Ruby with no moat. Next.

ch4s3

I looked closely at Crystal when it first got popular but they removed the REPL which for me made Elixir a better choice.

burlesona

It’s sad that we don’t write code anymore, it takes a lot of the joy of stuff like this away.

opem

great that aarch64-linux support is now promoted to Tier 1! finally, I can convince my CTO to port some of our services in crystal for those cheap hetzner machines.

alberth

Glad to see the continued progress on adding support for Windows.

giancarlostoro

Crystal might not be the most popular, but it is very interesting to me, I'm not a Ruby guy, but I was looking into other languages other than Go, Rust, etc that are natively compiled, I've dabbled with Nim, but I really wanted to try something slightly different, and I'm honestly impressed, it needs some slight polish still, maybe better funding might help, but in a different timeline under the right conditions, I genuinely think Crystal could have taken off as a really solid language. It's LLVM based, has green threads (that are insanely lightweight), has C-interop, has a comp-time macro system for AST inspection, code generation and removing boilerplate code. The web frameworks look interesting too, but I haven't deep dived those just yet. You really get a Rubylike language with native performance which is very interesting. One thing I wanted out of Nim is slightly more Python-likeness, I want regular OOP, since Crystal takes from Ruby (I believe it was originally written in Ruby, before it became self-hosting) it has sane OOP features I miss when I use Go, Rust or even Nim. I really feel in a different timeline, Crystal could have been something, I also feel like "Ruby" for some leaves a bad taste, but Ruby is nowhere near as awful as most people think, even though it was never for me, it was still one of the nicest ecosystems I ever worked with long before Go got its package management situation situated. Edit one more thought: I believe the Windows installer / Windows support for Crystal is a newer addition if I'm not mistaken, so it took a while before it got proper Windows support. Well, I just googled it, it started in 2023... but still, that's fairly recent by my book. I think any programming language should strive to work across the "big three" as soon as possible to increase adoption. Go took off the moment it came out for Windows and was formally released.

rubiquity

I may be one of the few to use Crystal in anger for long running programs but unfortunately we had to do away with it because of longstanding issues in the runtime where exceptions at the wrong time during I/O bring the runtime to a halt. It's been a few years so I don't have the github issue off the top of my head anymore. I'd like to think that if they could redesign the language again they would not have exceptions and destructors/finalize. It's a great language for CLIs though. I'm glad to see the team still pressing on.

todotask2

I used Crystal for a year before moving on to Go, which I value for its faster build times. Bun also keeps improving at fast pace and constantly reduce memory usage which can be useful on budget server.

viraptor

I've been happy using Crystal for many things. It's very convenient for small server deploys. When processing a lot of execution traces I ported previous Ruby code to get 40x support boost and 3x memory reduction, while keeping the code virtually the same. And it's nice to see each version is getting better. The reference could get some love, but it's still ok.