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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

crystal-lang.org

161–170 of 351 posts

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#161
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. With Kotlin native, Kotlin js and most importantly Graal native this is plain wrong.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#162

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…

Also, it produces binaries (probably similar to golang) which are a reasonable size considering there is a garbage collector. No giant interpretors or VMs required.

And macros.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#163
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. With Kotlin native, Kotlin js and most importantly Graal native this is plain wrong.

This is correct today.

This was not the case when Crystal development started.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#164
Crystal has been my language for my passion project (https://gitlab.com/maxpert/crlocator). I can tell you the speed and magical ruby syntax is unbelievably good (not for everyone’s taste). I just wish a better IDE support now. Since I’ve used Kotlin I’ve been spoiled by the IDE. But I assume it should be relatively straightforward because it’s all static typed.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#165
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…

Erlang has been doing this for the better part of three decades. Of course Erlang doesn't compile to native code, so at least that's a difference.

Funnily, there is also a language with Ruby syntax, but for Erlang VM, called Elixir.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#166

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?

Why Kotlin when you got Swift is an equally valid point. People like choice and for a lot of us, running on the JVM is a non starter.

Try creating a small command line tool for a JVM language. You need to distribute a virtual machine with it. You got the overhead of firing up a VM or JIT just for a short lived session.

Also JVM gobbles memory. You would not want a system made up of lots of tiny command line tools all running on a JVM. That would be a lot of overhead.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#167
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. With Kotlin native, Kotlin js and most importantly Graal native this is plain wrong.

That is like a hack. You are basically dumping a JIT image to file. That means all sorts of caveats apply such as be real careful about how you use reflection.

Also there is no ABI so you cannot use anything like a native DLL.

Native compilation while possible is clearly second class on the JVM platform. For Crystal it is first class.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#168

Crystal has been my language for my passion project ( https://gitlab.com/maxpert/crlocator ). I can tell you the speed and magical ruby syntax is unbelievably good (not for everyone’s taste). I just wish a better IDE support now. Since I’ve used Kotlin I’ve been spoiled by the IDE. But I assume it should be relatively straightforward because it’s all static typed.

Looks very fast to type. The faster I can code anything in a programming language, the better, if it looks clean. Which it does.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#169
post #99

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…

I feel like it would be easier and cheaper to negotiate a support contract with Manas (Crystal) than with Google (Go, Dart) if your company wants paid support.

Re: Crystal 1.0 – What to expect

#170
post #116
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…

> automatically multiplexing the lightweight threads onto a smaller number of OS threads For Crystal 1.0, the number of OS threads is always 1, isn’t it? So although this provides concurrency, it’s less powerful than Go where the same mechanism also provides parallelism.

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