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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

crystal-lang.org

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Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#81

Post by Trasmatta »

dkarras wrote: post #75
Trasmatta wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "why" is basically having a language with the aesthetics and usability of Ruby, but fully statically typed with global type inference, and impressive performance. The downside being a relatively slow compiler. It's the necessary trade-off for the type inference.

See, when you add "performance" to those properties it piques my interest. I'd love me a high performance language that is sanely typed, allows for metaprogramming, feels like an interpreted language while doing so etc. However the main page says absolutely nothing about performance. I even don't care about compile times. So what is the performance like?

You can find some benchmarks here: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

With the caveat of course being that benchmarks don't always reflect real world performance.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#83

Post by straight-shoota »

Thaxll wrote: post #70
Trasmatta wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "why" is basically having a language with the aesthetics and usability of Ruby, but fully statically typed with global type inference, and impressive performance. The downside being a relatively slow compiler. It's the necessary trade-off for the type inference.

The "downside" you forgot to mention a lot of important things: - tooling is abyssmal ( IDE etc ... ) - no mutli threading - no real support, I'm not even sure if there is one paid guy anymnore on the project - it's still immature - they break the API all the time

Crystal is sponsored by https://manas.tech/ and the company actively provides paid support to a number of commercial clients. Breaking changes have been really low lately. I have a couple of shards that work on 1.0 as well as they did on 0.27 or so (that's 10 major dev releases ago). And with 1.0 there is a guarantee to not have breaking changes until 2.0. I don't agree to the other points too, but that's more subjective.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#84

Post by zem »

tomc1985 wrote: post #49
genuine_smiles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

still no windows support :( desktop gui development was my main wish for crystal too, but ruling out a bunch of end users right out of the box was not an option.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#86

Post by wiremine »

dang wrote: post #53

If curious, here are the significant past threads I found. Others? An Introduction to Crystal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217013 - Feb 2021 (39 comments) Switch from Ruby to Crystal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25005780 - Nov 2020 (35 comments) Go vs. Crystal Performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615303 - June 2020 (160 comments) Ruby vs. Crystal Performance - https://news.ycombi…

This is great, thanks for putting in the time to put this together!

Side note: Anybody know of tools that auto-compile lists like this? I'm sure it's not perfect, but these sorts of reviews really add value to the current conversation.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#88

Post by coldtea »

dkarras wrote: post #52

I think any new programming language should have a "why?" section on their page. I mean obviously this language is serving a need, but what is it? In any case, congrats! I like the features and would like to give it a try some day. I'm still curious about the motivations of this particular language though. Anyone more familiar care to elaborate a bit? Edit: Ok, looks like there is a "why" section on github!

>I think any new programming language should have a "why?" section on their page.

It's right here:

https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#89

Post by dorianmariefr »

dang wrote: post #53

If curious, here are the significant past threads I found. Others? An Introduction to Crystal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217013 - Feb 2021 (39 comments) Switch from Ruby to Crystal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25005780 - Nov 2020 (35 comments) Go vs. Crystal Performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615303 - June 2020 (160 comments) Ruby vs. Crystal Performance - https://news.ycombi…

It just proves there is a strong interest in Crystal

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#90

Post by devmunchies »

rienko wrote: post #62
terracatta wrote: post #11

I love the idea of Crystal but I remember reading that compilation times can balloon very quickly for moderately sized apps. Can anyone who writes Crystal today dispel or confirm that information? I imagine the inferred typing makes building a fast compiler really tough.

This comes from my experience building a prototype cli application, the language itself fells very productive, and the stdlib is robust fast and useful. Compiling isn't fast. By the language design it won't ever be possible to be in the same ballpark as golang. It's common for us that our 5k lines app, take >1m to build in release mode as we added more and more dependencies for integrations with different nosql datab…

> It's common for us that our 5k lines app, take >1m to build in release mode

Yes, for this reason I think crystal could be one of the best languages for microservices or faas.

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