Crystal 0.24.1 released

Crystal is a programming language. https://crystal-lang.org/ Crystal’s syntax is heavily inspired by Ruby’s, so it feels natural to read and easy to write, and has the added benefit of a lower learning curve for experienced Ruby devs.

I feel like Crystal has been alpha for 4 years.

I really like initiatives like Crystal and Nim, in that they appeal to users of popular languages like Ruby and Python yet are much faster.

But I fear that the problem they solve isn't big enough. For desktop/mobile apps, they need a UI framework so I suppose they're targeted at web or network/system programming mostly. However, "Faster Ruby" or "Faster Python" is, in practice, solved by faster hardware as well. At the same time, for web apps to truly scale you need more than just a constant factor increase in speed - you need to handle parallelism better. This is what Go and Erlang/Elixir do with green threads, or Rust with its borrow checker.

This is why I've been surprised that a well thought out and polished initiative like Crystal doesn't do anything in this area, and makes me fear that its popularity might not last. Nim was all over HN a few years ago and now not seen that much anymore - Crystal is obviously different from Nim but they tackle many of the same problems in similar enough ways.

I fear/hope that, because of this, languages like Pony[0] will stick around longer - it seems to combine the best ideas from Crystal, Erlang and Rust in an ergonomic way.

[0] https://playground.ponylang.org/

" solved by faster hardware as well. "

Not really, for a few reasons. First, hardware is not getting much faster per core anymore, and in the case of python (maybe ruby too?) making efficient use of more cores is not easy. Secondly, CPU performance is largely limited by ram latency and throughput. The inability of high level, interpreted, safe language to carefully control memory access patterns means you run into the limitations of RAM more often, leaving your fast CPU idle much of the time.

Disclaimer: I'm a core Nim dev.

To be honest I am unsure what Pony provides that Nim doesn't. Perhaps I just haven't looked closely enough at it.

One thing I do know is that from my years of using Nim I never had any trouble with parallelism. There are no green threads, but there is a solid thread pool implementation[1] and a mechanism that ensures memory isn't shared between threads without a lock or a channel (GC safety)[2].

Maybe you could give me a TL;DR of what Pony does better? :)

1 - https://nim-lang.org/docs/threadpool.html

2 - https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#threads-gc-safety