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Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

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Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#51

Post by mannycalavera »

RX14 wrote: post #45
mannycalavera wrote: post #33

I've been keeping my eye on Crystal for a while now thinking about making the plunge and writing something production ready in it. But I'm a bit vary as for the casual observer the Crystal project github ( https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal ) seems brim with unsolved issues (over 500 issues!) and stale PR-s (over 105!). I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community…

The number of open issues is a bad correlation for how well a project is managed: rust has nearly 4000 open issues. Most of these are either feature requests we'll get to some day, or minor bugs. Crystal development is proceding nicely and we will have two developers (bcardiff and me) working full-time on crystal this summer.

That's great and thank you for responding! I agree that the number of open issues is not a good indicator of project management. I was more worried about PRs being open in 2016, 2017 and still lingering - this in connection with a large number of open issues seemed like a possible red flag. But it may be just an issue of triage.

Keep up the good work!

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#52

Post by DonaldFisk »

jsjolen wrote: post #19
giancarlostoro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need an interpreted runtime for the language for that to work. D has a 'scripting' runtime but I'm not sure if anyone's done a REPL or what the limitations would be.

/smug-lisp-weenie-mode I didn't realise that SBCL is interpreted.

I'm not sure how SBCL is implemented, but I've written my own Lisp. It's incrementally compiled to byte code - the compiler is called when defun or defmacro is evaluated - but the REPL still relies on the interpreter, the same interpreter which does everything until the compiler compiles itself during a clean build.

So compiled code can have a REPL, but a REPL needs an interpreter as well.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#53

Post by RX14 »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

Well, here is why not. AFAK, it still lacks support for parallelism / multicore programming. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Once it has that, I'll be happy to learn it, but currently it's concurrency seems to be as limited as Racket's. That's a big obstacle for early adoption, since the trend is going towards 64 cores sooner than later. My current CPU already has 8 physical cores and 16 logical cores, and I'd like t…

Crystal has the foundation for parallelism, it has the same concurrency model as go. Adding parallelism will happen before 1.0. Adding parallelism to crystal is easy, it's already been done in a branch and it works fine. The problem is getting the implementation fast enough that it doesn't regress performance for IO bound workloads. It's coming, just wait :)

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#54

Post by jgh »

wsgeek wrote: post #44

I think some of the comments here are unfair to Crystal and the careful thought (and lots of work!) that has been put into it. Projects like this should not be so easily dismissed as "also-rans". I read through the Crystal language docs (meaning just the syntax etc) and as a seasoned C++ and Python developer who is _constantly_ looking for something with better performance (than Python) yet much cleaner (than C++), I…

I'm similar to you. An every-day / almost every day C++ user. I've been using Clojure for a personal project and I really enjoy the much-reduced overhead imposed by the language. Unfortunately it runs on the JVM so that's not something I'm super stoked about. But this language seems interesting. The interoperability with C libs gives it a head start. The syntax seems much nicer than Rust. Too bad about the parallelism but frankly you can get by with a single core for a lot of things, I'm sure it's on the roadmap anyhow.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#55

Post by RX14 »

ecshafer wrote: post #37
sam0x17 wrote: post #24

hey guys OP here just a note on parallelism -- once windows support is done (very soon), parallelism is the #1 priority of the dev team. If you are looking for syntax examples check out the docs there are tons of examples here: https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/

I think not having a parallelism first mindset will be the killer of the language. It's too important in today's world to not have that be an essential part of the language from the beginning. Rust and go for example we're 100% designed around parallelism.

I think you're getting confused by concurrency and parallelism. Crystal is concurrency-first and uses the same concurrency model as go. Expanding that to run fibers on multiple cores is just an implementation detail.

A difficult implementation detail, but it shouldn't affect the core of the language.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#56

Post by RX14 »

mannycalavera wrote: post #51
RX14 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of open issues is a bad correlation for how well a project is managed: rust has nearly 4000 open issues. Most of these are either feature requests we'll get to some day, or minor bugs. Crystal development is proceding nicely and we will have two developers (bcardiff and me) working full-time on crystal this summer.

That's great and thank you for responding! I agree that the number of open issues is not a good indicator of project management. I was more worried about PRs being open in 2016, 2017 and still lingering - this in connection with a large number of open issues seemed like a possible red flag. But it may be just an issue of triage. Keep up the good work!

Every project has it's warts, long running feature requests, and it's bugs so minor nobody's gotten around to fixing them.

Some projects decide to hide those by closing the issues, we generally keep them open, because they are still valid issues.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#57

Post by wsgeek »

jgh wrote: post #54
wsgeek wrote: post #44

I think some of the comments here are unfair to Crystal and the careful thought (and lots of work!) that has been put into it. Projects like this should not be so easily dismissed as "also-rans". I read through the Crystal language docs (meaning just the syntax etc) and as a seasoned C++ and Python developer who is _constantly_ looking for something with better performance (than Python) yet much cleaner (than C++), I…

I'm similar to you. An every-day / almost every day C++ user. I've been using Clojure for a personal project and I really enjoy the much-reduced overhead imposed by the language. Unfortunately it runs on the JVM so that's not something I'm super stoked about. But this language seems interesting. The interoperability with C libs gives it a head start. The syntax seems much nicer than Rust. Too bad about the parallelis…

Lisps are all very, very cool -- you basically get to build your own world. And the macros -- so powerful. But the parens! Not the number of them, as that is about the same as other langs, but the placement of them:

Sample factorial function:

(define fac (lambda (n) (if (= n 0) 1 (* n (fac (- n 1)))))) ; And with Clojure, you don't have proper tail recursion, so you'll have to add some Clojure-only thing in there to prevent the above code from blowing up for large numbers.

There's really no getting around it -- Lisp, for many people, is just hard to parse. Consider:

def fac(n): n Yay! No noise. But I agree, there are some cool things about Clojure.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#58

Post by bjpbakker »

> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL

This has nothing to do with being a "compiled" language, nor with being a statically types language for that matter.

If languages like Haskell and Idris can have a repl, very basic languages like Crystal certainly can. I can imagine it not being their top priority though.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#59

Post by coldtea »

mannycalavera wrote: post #33

I've been keeping my eye on Crystal for a while now thinking about making the plunge and writing something production ready in it. But I'm a bit vary as for the casual observer the Crystal project github ( https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal ) seems brim with unsolved issues (over 500 issues!) and stale PR-s (over 105!). I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community…

>I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community engagement

You missed another possibility: it being perfectly normal.

If you check any large-ish project you'll find 100s or 1000s of unsolved issues and stale PRs.

And I'm talking about seasoned, used in production, products, from MySQL to Chromium and whatever...

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#60

Post by ModernMech »

sam0x17 wrote: post #31
ModernMech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main difference between compiled and static languages is that compiled languages go through a phase of "checking your work", where it compares parts of your program to other parts before running it. For example, if you misspelled a name, the compiler will look everywhere in your program for that name before you run it, and tell you it can't find the name. That's why we like compiled languages. By contrast, dynami…

This explains it a lot better than I do in the article.

And yet I got downvoted.
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