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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

crystal-lang.org

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Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#41

Post by Shoop »

benbristow wrote: post #35
ibraheemdev wrote: post #4

It feels like Crystal it took all the best things from the languages I love, and put them together into one, beautiful language: - Elegance of Ruby - Statically type checked + global type inference - No Nulls - Go-like concurrency - Easy C ffi - High performance I really hope the Crystal succeeds and the language goes mainstream - this release is a huge step forward towards that. Congrats to the Crystal team for reac…

> No Nulls Does it not? It has 'nil', just like Ruby. Basically the same thing, the docs literally say it's 'similar to null in other languages'. https://crystal-lang.org/reference/syntax_and_semantics/lite...

It looks like it has nullable (nilable) types [0]. So a variable cannot be nil unless it is explicitly marked as having a nilable type.

[0] https://crystal-lang.org/reference/syntax_and_semantics/type...

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#42

Post by straight-shoota »

benbristow wrote: post #35
ibraheemdev wrote: post #4

It feels like Crystal it took all the best things from the languages I love, and put them together into one, beautiful language: - Elegance of Ruby - Statically type checked + global type inference - No Nulls - Go-like concurrency - Easy C ffi - High performance I really hope the Crystal succeeds and the language goes mainstream - this release is a huge step forward towards that. Congrats to the Crystal team for reac…

> No Nulls Does it not? It has 'nil', just like Ruby. Basically the same thing, the docs literally say it's 'similar to null in other languages'. https://crystal-lang.org/reference/syntax_and_semantics/lite...

More accurately would be "no surprising nulls at runtime". If a value can be `nil`, the compiler forces to treat it as nilable. It doesn't throw random null pointer exceptions.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#44

Post by astrowilson »

johnfn wrote: post #28

Huh - what's the last language that got mainstream adoption without backing from a large company? It almost seems impossible these days. Ruby?

It depends on what you mean by mainstream and by large company but Clojure, Elixir, and Elm are all languages that are frequently on HN and they were either personal projects or backed by small companies (<40 employees). I think Julia too.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#45

Post by denysvitali »

I really need to give Crystal another try. It was a very good language 2-3 years ago, but it was not "production ready" and had a lot of breaking changes. I'm glad to see it reaching such a nice milestone, I'll definitely give it another try and hopefully fall in love with it again :)

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#47

Post by shirleyquirk »

neolog wrote: post #15

How does it compare to Nim?

similar clarity and elegance of expression (crystal is a bit more beautiful i think)

both use significant whitespace

nim has better cross-platform and embedded support, as crystal targets llvm while nim targets c/c++/js

nim has more low-level support with the tradeoff of supporting dangerous things like raw pointers

crystal has better async imho

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#49

Post by tomc1985 »

genuine_smiles wrote: post #19
tomc1985 wrote: post #5

Really happy to see this go 1.0. Between Crystal and Zig it's nice to see C++/Rust get some competition

Would a developer looking a Zig/C++/Rust really also consider Crystal? I figured Crystal was for Ruby developers who want a good static type system.

Ruby 3 does static typing, so that would be the quickest path for static types.

Crystal is interesting to me because its a systems language, using Ruby syntax and idioms.

I'm a Rails developer by trade but I've been pining to go back into desktop GUI development. Right now the only viable cross-platform options seem to be Swing and Electron. I'm not sure what the desktop story is with Crystal but if it there is a workable solution based on GTK or something similar I'd be very happy!

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#50

Post by pjmlp »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #4

It feels like Crystal it took all the best things from the languages I love, and put them together into one, beautiful language: - Elegance of Ruby - Statically type checked + global type inference - No Nulls - Go-like concurrency - Easy C ffi - High performance I really hope the Crystal succeeds and the language goes mainstream - this release is a huge step forward towards that. Congrats to the Crystal team for reac…

Me too.

I don't have any use for it, however as language geek it is quite nice to see ecosystems blossom.

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