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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

crystal-lang.org

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Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#91

Post by yxhuvud »

mathgladiator wrote: post #63
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…

Wow, this is a great compilation! While I'm not using Crystal, this is a great "marketing plan" for any new language.

Däng, that posted the list, is a moderator. It is probably pretty safe to say he is posting the list for the sake of curious readers rather than for marketing purposes.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#92

Post by nlh »

revskill wrote: post #9

Waiting for Crystal On React (not Rails)

I'm a huge Crystal fan and spoke at the first user conference recently about my project which is almost what you're asking for:

https://nlh.me/projects/celestite

It's a way to tightly integrate Crystal + Svelte, including server-side rendering and the ability to write your frontend purely from components.

Not React (yet), but it's heading in that direction...

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#93

Post by tomc1985 »

zem wrote: post #84
tomc1985 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like Windows support is preliminary. They are working on it...

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#94

Post by yxhuvud »

shirleyquirk wrote: post #47
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

Hmm, what can you do with pointers in nim that you can't do in Crystal?

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#95

Post by coder543 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #51
the_duke wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crystal has a GC. I see it as more similar to the likes of Nim, Swift, Java or C#. It's a great language regardless.

Ah! I hadn't thought of those, though I think because 3 out of 4 are tied to a specific platform

I think you mean 1 out of 4?

Swift is the only one on that list that really feels tied to any particular platform.

C# has been extremely portable for years now thanks to .NET Core. Even SQL Server runs on Linux these days, if you really just enjoy spending money.

Java has always had a strong focus on portability, of course.

Nim... I don't know much about. Doesn't it compile to C? I don't think it intentionally has any particular platform affinity, although I wouldn't be surprised if it worked best on Linux.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#96

Post by bovermyer »

I've been waiting for this. I played around with Crystal earlier in its development, and even threw some money the devs' way to help with costs.

Now I'm going to spend time writing something non-trivial in Crystal. Very excited!

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#97

Post by nitrogen »

wiremine wrote: post #86
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.

Speculating: since dang is HN's main moderator, there might be some tools built into either HN or HN search that help with those types of lists, possibly related to dupe detection.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#98

Post by kryogen1c »

wiremine wrote: post #86
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.

well! allow me to share a feature i discovered a few days ago after reading for years.

when you browse via the web (unsure which apps support this feature), clicking the title - in this case, Crystal 1.0 – does what you expect and takes you to the article. in tinier font next to the title - in this case, (crystal-lang.org) - is a link that shows all the previous HN submissions for that website, which happens to be pretty similar to what dang posted.

this wont work for platforms like medium or reuters, but is a big head start for a single-issue website like this.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#99

Post by offtop5 »

gravypod wrote: post #78
Thaxll wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> - tooling is abyssmal ( IDE etc ... ) As others have mentioned this is a side effect of how young it is. > - no real support, I'm not even sure if there is one paid guy anymnore on the project If paid support is all that counts then most languages would fall into that. > - it's still immature Tautological. Nothing can become mature without first being immature. > - they break the API all the time Isn't that what a…

>If paid support is all that counts then most languages would fall into that.

Can you name another recent programming language that wasn't developed in-house at a major company. Go , Dart , and Rust all started out with paid teams of programmers working on them.

Not sure if Crystal will be able to progress at a rate fast enough to keep people interested. Likewise, you'd have to be insane to try and pitch this to your project manager. I consider myself to be a risk taker, but even for my own side projects I stick to older better known programming languages.

it feels like we keep trying to solve the same problems over and over again instead of utilizing solutions which already exist

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#100

Post by hootbootscoot »

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!

HTTP is a first class member of the standard library, along with bcrypt, JSON, and a host of other useful stuff?

https://crystal-lang.org/api

This is a sweet spot for anything web-server related (which is quite a lot, these days, considering mobile API's and such...)

I would actually hesitate to use a framework for many use cases, although Amber and Lucky are competing for a "soup-to-nuts" total platform, Kemal fills the Sinatra/Express niche nicely, and you really find yourself wondering what you want.

The "shards" module system is very nice, and no external tool is needed, it comes with Crystal.

No need for a C FFI, you can directly wrap the C ABI or C libraries and call both ways (from C to Crystal, from Crystal to C)

It's not Rust nor C nor C++ but more like a better Go, in terms of being a statically typed compiled language that, nonetheless, is garbage-collected (everything is an object, check the API docs I linked above) but it's syntax is like Ruby, and so it' basically eats Elixer and all that's lunch... (Lucky takes on Phoenix, Amber takes on Rails? lol)

It's also extremely fast, and the memory footprint is tiny... (anecdotal, but a 40kloc that was around 500mb ram on node is currently using 12mb)

The compiler catches many errors and long-running applications don't apparently leak memory (cough cough anything dynamic) and one has the feeling that the static typing is allowing stack-frames scoping and Boehm to play nicely together, but this is just anecdotal.

I guess you have one way to find out "Why Crystal"

Let's not HackerNews Bikeshed this to death... go try it... you'll probably like it.

Tooling? I use gedit, so I'm the wrong guy to ask. It works fine on most "ruby" presets for text coloration/highlighting whatever you call that stuff...

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