Why Crystal, 10 Years Later: Performance and Joy

anilgulecha

Crystal was always something I looked at ~5 yrs ago - alongside golang and rust. But it would out of the new cycles. Looks like they solved for 2 big things in these years: fast development cycles and windows support. Very cool. I wonder how it stacks up against golang for production apps. Anyone comment?

rirze

I'm reading through the documentation and I'm not getting the value prospect from using Crystal. Is it essentially "Ruby-like" + "easier access to performance"? Apologies if this is too reductive but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683815 shows there are multiple concerns about why one would use this language in the current age. What does Crystal bring to the language decision tree in 2026?

fhn

Crystal is a nice language if you are already familiar with Ruby (best scripting language IMO). I think the small community and lack of packages(or not updated) is a bummer. If they can compile Ruby packages, that would increase package count significantly. Also, a book for learning would be helpful, perhaps a community wiki. I'll have to jump back into it and try out Kemal.