I've been playing around with Crystal for some toy projects as well as some data cleaning/munging scripts. I had a fairly large CSV dump that was making Ruby choke to death - porting to Crystal was trivial and it ran amazingly fast!
I'm super interested to see where the concurrency story goes in Crystal. Fingers crossed!
I've seen a lot of people (myself included) going from ruby to elixir
As an outsider, a non-Ruby-user, I find it strange that Ruby users seem to be migrating to languages that are similar only in syntax but vastly different in nearly every other imaginable way. Do Ruby users care only about syntax? Maybe I'm not so different? Maybe my preference for ALGOL syntax just gives me more language options?
Actually it's more than just syntax, elixir and crystal borrow a lot of ruby's stdlib api design, which in my opinion is way more pleasant than other languages'.
Crystal is indeed a very nice language, but the only thing that is holding me from using it greatly, is that it still uses the Boehm GC, which makes it hard to compete with other languages in a production setting.
I understand we might get there one day but I'm afraid this is taking far too long.
I use Python and I just don't like 1-based indexed languages. I would say that a better replacement for Python(at least for backend) is Go.
Go removes so much of the expressive power that writing it after Python is a bit of a pain. OTOH I realize that many people don't use that expressive power and are happy with copy-pasting stuff.
One thing I immediately miss from Python after using Go is building a dict (e.g. for writing JSON values). I had to type map[string]interface{} so many times =P
As an outsider, a non-Ruby-user, I find it strange that Ruby users seem to be migrating to languages that are similar only in syntax but vastly different in nearly every other imaginable way. Do Ruby users care only about syntax? Maybe I'm not so different? Maybe my preference for ALGOL syntax just gives me more language options?
It's a "get hooked with the syntax, stay for the features" situation. Elixir leverages the incredible robustness of the erlang virtual machine. So much so, that for me, anyways, it's hard to imagine using anything else without losing sleep anymore.
i've read a lot about erlang vm, but i'm curious which feature makes it hard for you to imagine using something else, in practice. What are the things that saved you, in your experience.
I wonder why Ruby users don’t flock to Crystal, and Python users to Julia. With all the whining about performance and types, they just stay put.
n=1 but I am a Rubyist migrating to Julia, FWIW.
I'm curious what makes you want to move to Julia, because it seems that the overall philosophy of the two languages are quite far from each other. Would you mind if you share?
Crystal is indeed a very nice language, but the only thing that is holding me from using it greatly, is that it still uses the Boehm GC, which makes it hard to compete with other languages in a production setting. I understand we might get there one day but I'm afraid this is taking far too long.
Pony's ORCA GC is supposed to be the faster than Erlang's BEAM/HiPE and Azul C4. Ideally, it would be extracted from that language and examples given how to integrate it with the likes of LLVM (it's not compatible OOTB with LLVM's API because of different synchronization primitives).