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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

crystal-lang.org

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Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#101

Post by dang »

nitrogen wrote: post #97
wiremine wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes - some explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245003 and the link back from there.

Edit: I still want to make this a community/collaborative effort. As HN's archive grows it gets richer, so this gets increasingly worth doing over time. The recent changes are a small step in that direction.

Edit 2: maybe someday it could be integrated somehow with the criminally neglected Usenet archive and go all the way back.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#102

Post by gravypod »

offtop5 wrote: post #99
gravypod wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

Do zig, python, elisp, Clojure, Haskell (mostly a research project), etc fit the bill?

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#103

Post by The_rationalist »

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…

All of those points are already met and in a better way by mature languages like e.g Kotlin. Really the only argument would be the "Ruby elegance" (or familiarity?) which I don't know. What make ruby/crystal more "elegant" (I would prefer the term readable) than the competition?

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#104

Post by sjwright »

straight-shoota wrote: post #36
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crystal's appeal, for me at least, is the productivity of Ruby with the memory efficiency and execution speed of C++. Static typing is just a way of achieving that, it's not something I'm seeking per se.

Remember static typing is also really useful for code quality and avoiding hidden bugs. Some code in Ruby requires a ton of specs to discover bugs caused by type issues, while the Crystal compiler tells you immediately that something doesn't work out. I love Crystal's type system really for productivity reasons.

I haven’t ever understood the argument against static typing. I’ve never declared a variable and not simultaneously thought “this is going to be a float, always a float, never not a float.”

The only exception to this is untrusted input, but for that an string is usually always fine.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#105

Post by The_rationalist »

samuell wrote: post #55

Congrats on the release! The biggest factor drawing me to experiment a little with Crystal is that it is one of very few languages providing what otherwise has been pretty unique to Go: Lightweight threads+Channels+M:N concurrency (automatically multiplexing the lightweight threads onto a smaller number of OS threads). Also it does it with a very readable and clean syntax. Wrote a little about it, with code compariso…

The biggest factor drawing me to experiment a little with Crystal is that it is one of very few languages providing what otherwise has been pretty unique to Go: Lightweight threads+Channels+M:N concurrency This has no value proposition versus Kotlin coroutines and if it doesn't have first class support for structured concurrency, cancelation and most importantly reactive streams then this language is sub-par.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#106

Post by offtop5 »

gravypod wrote: post #102
offtop5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Do zig, python, elisp, Clojure, Haskell (mostly a research project), etc fit the bill?

Out of those Pythons the only one that's widely used in production, and it's been around for a long time. Python itself is an extremely simple language, which I think can work as one person passion project.

Modern python has grown significantly from its first release in the 90s though. I don't think that can happen today, we all want too much out of our programming languages.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#107

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #23
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.

Crystal's appeal, for me at least, is the productivity of Ruby with the memory efficiency and execution speed of C++. Static typing is just a way of achieving that, it's not something I'm seeking per se.

Is static typing really necessary for speed?

The fastest JavaScript engines and LuaJIT are closer in speed to Crystal than Crystal is to C.

Granted - all these languages are really fast - and unless you're doing something INSANELY performance dependent and you REALLY know what you're doing - I think familiarity trumps all. You're almost certainly going to write faster Crystal code if you're a Crystal expert than you would write C, C++, or Rust.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#108

Post by lgessler »

offtop5 wrote: post #106
gravypod wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do zig, python, elisp, Clojure, Haskell (mostly a research project), etc fit the bill?

Out of those Pythons the only one that's widely used in production, and it's been around for a long time. Python itself is an extremely simple language, which I think can work as one person passion project. Modern python has grown significantly from its first release in the 90s though. I don't think that can happen today, we all want too much out of our programming languages.

I can't speak to the others on the list but it seems odd to say Clojure isn't being used widely in production. Clojure's been powering big businesses for years now and Nubank, which primarily uses Clojure, is valued at $24bn: https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2021/brazilia....

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#109

Post by lemming »

offtop5 wrote: post #106
gravypod wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do zig, python, elisp, Clojure, Haskell (mostly a research project), etc fit the bill?

Out of those Pythons the only one that's widely used in production, and it's been around for a long time. Python itself is an extremely simple language, which I think can work as one person passion project. Modern python has grown significantly from its first release in the 90s though. I don't think that can happen today, we all want too much out of our programming languages.

All these companies, and more, are using Clojure in production: https://clojure.org/community/companies.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#110

Post by nine_k »

The_rationalist wrote: post #103
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…

All of those points are already met and in a better way by mature languages like e.g Kotlin. Really the only argument would be the "Ruby elegance" (or familiarity?) which I don't know. What make ruby/crystal more "elegant" (I would prefer the term readable ) than the competition?

Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. Kotlin is heavily oriented towards Java familiarity and interoperability, Crystal is heavily oriented towards Ruby familiarity, and C interoperability.

Also, Crystal was first released in 2014, when Kotlin was like 3 years old, and 100% JVM-bound.

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