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Crystal 0.25.1 released

crystal-lang.org

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Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#51

Post by coldtea »

everdev wrote: post #11
Blackstone4 wrote: post #5

Crystal looks interesting although I decided to learn Golang instead. It's more mature and the WIP features described below made me cautious (i.e. what other features are immature). Anyone know when Crystal will get concurrency-a-la-golang? i.e. running concurrent processes in parallel? At the moment I think it's still single-threaded. https://crystal-lang.org/docs/guides/concurrency.html Still no windows support: ht…

I've programmed in both and as far as I can tell here's the best use case for each: Go - I want to program explicitly and don't mind a little extra code or syntax to do it. I want close to the best performance possible and a single distributable binary. I don't mind being encouraged to "roll my own" api / web app rather than using a framework. Crystal - I want to feel like I'm writing in Ruby, but with type checking…

>I don't mind being a little less performant than other compiled languages.

The same, if not more so, goes for Go. It might be statically compiled, but it's far from the most optimised performer.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#52

Post by wokawoka »

Godspeed to the Crystal team. Third party library means everything.

Otherwise you end up with the same problem: "cool language...now I need to bind it to a C library to do this..."

Still betting on Rust and it's ecosystem.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#53

Post by coldtea »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #19
sdogruyol wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Crystal at RainforestQA to replace our heavy-load / slowish Ruby microservices. It's been great so far and we love it. We're also increasing the adoption to Crystal inside the organization. Also Crystal has a dedicated a wiki page for production users Used in production: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-in-product...

What drew you to Crystal? If you'll forgive the snark, you've moved from one obscure language, to an even more obscure language that even fewer developers know. What is it about Crystal that outweighs the very boring practical downsides of production use of obscure and immature languages?

>What is it about Crystal that outweighs the very boring practical downsides of production use of obscure and immature languages?

Tons of startups, and tons of billion dollar companies, run on Ruby / Rails. How is it "obscure"?

Crystal sure.

Then again, PG who created Hacker News used Common Lisp, which at the time had about the same developer pool as Crystal give or take (well, not really, but close enough, compared with industry favorite languages).

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#54

Post by coldtea »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #38
RX14 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because they loved the language. Humans are humans, and not everything is made with a rational financial decision. If you use the language, and like ruby and static typing, you'll find that there's a lot to love.

I see your point, but I sympathise with it less and less as time goes on. Programming languages are just tools. Software development should strive to be a proper, rational, engineering discipline. Humans aren't robots, but one's choice of development tools is steered by real forces, both technical and business. I don't see that whim, unconstrained by such forces, has any place in the decision. Same goes for curiosity…

>Software development should strive to be a proper, rational, engineering discipline.

That will never happen. Or when it did it will be all mechanized, with machines doing the programming.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#55

Post by kodablah »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #5

Crystal looks interesting although I decided to learn Golang instead. It's more mature and the WIP features described below made me cautious (i.e. what other features are immature). Anyone know when Crystal will get concurrency-a-la-golang? i.e. running concurrent processes in parallel? At the moment I think it's still single-threaded. https://crystal-lang.org/docs/guides/concurrency.html Still no windows support: ht…

I think what we'll see coming soon, assuming some people work on it, is the recognition that Go's stdlib and all the supporting libs is where the real awesomeness lives. And for langs that support Go-style concurrency (like Crystal basically does, Kotlin, etc), people will start transpiling with only a couple of things dropping into the target language. There're just too many good pieces of crypto, http2, etc to rewrite it over and over.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#56

Post by coldtea »

Thaxll wrote: post #6
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Anyone using Crystal in production? What do you use it for?

I'm not sure why anyone would actually use it in the current state, unstable, lack of libraries, lack of community and the biggest problem no multi-threading / windows support

Why would those who do use and are happy with it, judging from the responses here, not use it?

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#57

Post by nicoburns »

sam0x17 wrote: post #34
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drew you to Crystal? If you'll forgive the snark, you've moved from one obscure language, to an even more obscure language that even fewer developers know. What is it about Crystal that outweighs the very boring practical downsides of production use of obscure and immature languages?

In silicon valley and among most of the startup community, Ruby still dominates the landscape, even when compared with Node.js, Python, etc. There's plenty of talk of companies re-writing their infrastructure in node, but why would you do that when you can have Rails and/or Crystal? Furthermore, if you ever need something from NPM, you can just throw it in a Google Cloud Function or in Lambda. https://medium.com/@yoe…

It's interesting that everyone's still using rails in silicon valley. Here in the UK, Laravel (PHP) and Django (python) are both more popular than Rails for new projects. But I hear that PHP isn't popular at all in the US?

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#58

Post by Thaxll »

nlh wrote: post #28
Thaxll wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone would actually use it in the current state, unstable, lack of libraries, lack of community and the biggest problem no multi-threading / windows support

I know you’re (effectively) trolling here, but there are many reasons to “actually” use it. The community is great and helpful (check out the Gitter activity if you have any question about that). Lack of Windows support (for now) doesn’t matter if....you don’t use Windows. Multi-threading is being worked on. You’re rehashing the same 2 things many folks point out that Crystal is missing in its pre-1.0 state and while…

I'm actually not trolling, I'm 100% serious, there is no reason to use that language right now when you have others languages that are better on every aspect. Maybe Crystal will be ready at some point but right now it's not.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#59

Post by sam0x17 »

nicoburns wrote: post #57
sam0x17 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In silicon valley and among most of the startup community, Ruby still dominates the landscape, even when compared with Node.js, Python, etc. There's plenty of talk of companies re-writing their infrastructure in node, but why would you do that when you can have Rails and/or Crystal? Furthermore, if you ever need something from NPM, you can just throw it in a Google Cloud Function or in Lambda. https://medium.com/@yoe…

It's interesting that everyone's still using rails in silicon valley. Here in the UK, Laravel (PHP) and Django (python) are both more popular than Rails for new projects. But I hear that PHP isn't popular at all in the US?

PHP in the U.S., especially in the startup world, is seen as "oh, you develop in third world countries". That's the perception these days unfortunately.

That said, I was an avid PHP developer in the U.S. about 10-15 years ago and I always liked the language. There's just no one learning PHP anymore since all the kids just learn js, and no one trying out "hipster" languages like ruby/crystal/go/python/elixr/d/nim/rust/etc is going to try crusty old PHP.

I will say though that PHP, without any frameworks, is probably my favorite thing to develop a simple standalone site specifically because it lets you break all conventions and just output some damn content possibly with some simple logic involved and without using classes/mvc/etc.

Re: Crystal 0.25.1 released

#60

Post by sam0x17 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #44

Are compilation times still incredibly slow? That was the deal breaker for me with crystal, toy project of maybe a few hundred lines of code taking 30+s to compile edit: specifically a static release compile, with shards build --no-debug --release --link-flags "-static"

Our ~100k line web app takes 10-15 seconds to compile.
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