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Earlier quoted context omitted.
ConcurrentModificationException?
That's hardly any better than undefined behavior. It's not the program you want to write, under any possible circumstance, and the language should tell you so.
Granted, I'm completely head over heels for Rust, and I agree completely that ConcurrentModificationException is a crappy answer, but it is defined behavior (AFAIK).
The really important questions in any modern language: (0) Does Crystal have a lot of undefined behavior like C? (1) Does understanding Crystal programs require a lot of trial and error just like in Ruby? (2) How good a job does Crystal do at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot? A language isn't to be judged just by the amazing programs you can write in it. (Turing-completeness and I/O facilities have that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's hardly any better than undefined behavior. It's not the program you want to write, under any possible circumstance, and the language should tell you so.
Pedantically, it's defined behavior, and doesn't use an interpreter lock. Granted, I'm completely head over heels for Rust, and I agree completely that ConcurrentModificationException is a crappy answer, but it is defined behavior (AFAIK).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ConcurrentModificationException?
That's hardly any better than undefined behavior. It's not the program you want to write, under any possible circumstance, and the language should tell you so.
I had never worked with compiled languages before I tried Crystal, but had always had a huge interest in getting into that. When I wanted to learn the compiled ecosystem I looked at languages like Go and Rust, but the learning curve for those was a bit overwhelming for a newbie. A while later I found Crystal, and much thanks to the simple syntax of the language I learned a ton of new things about compiled languages very quickly. The absolutely best part of the language is that it is written in plain Crystal, and I've been looking at their own implementations for various things a lot - something I've never done before, having worked mostly with Node, Lua and PHP before.
Nowadays I can delve into Go documentation, packages are clear to me and I just understand how things should and should not be implemented to achieve a good efficiency and performance level. The Little Go Book makes sense, the I/O package is simple and this is probably all thanks to the syntax of Crystal, the amazing language & standard library documentation but most importantly the source of Crystal being written in Crystal.
I'm currently working on building a business using Go, because I absolutely need Windows target support - something which Crystal does not yet have. But the second it gets that, I'm moving back. Don't get me wrong, Go is really great and nice to work with - but Crystal is my mentor. Please note that I have not worked with Ruby before, so the whole language was new to me.
To summarize; even if you only wish to learn, Crystal is in my personal opinion the best choice to go with.
The really important questions in any modern language: (0) Does Crystal have a lot of undefined behavior like C? (1) Does understanding Crystal programs require a lot of trial and error just like in Ruby? (2) How good a job does Crystal do at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot? A language isn't to be judged just by the amazing programs you can write in it. (Turing-completeness and I/O facilities have that…
I'd love for you to elaborate on (2). I don't think that's a criticism of Ruby I've heard before.
What advantages Crystal has compared to other more modern languages that aim to compete with C? For example D and Rust.
The claim is "fast as C", so I was surprised that the performance comparison was with Ruby, not with C. On my machine, the Ruby Fibonacci program executes in 47.5s, while a corresponding C program executes in 0.88s - that's a factor 54 difference, while the article reports a factor 35 for Crystal. That's good, but what causes the difference? This benchmark is pretty much all function call overhead, so I doubt it's re…
EDIT: There's also this: https://github.com/nsf/pnoise
Looks very nice. I hope it gains momentum. For now, if you want a fast language with the beauty and productivity of Ruby, check out Elixir [0] and its web framework, Phoenix [1]. I've been using Phoenix for a year, and it's the first framework that I've actually liked more over time. And I've been a web developer for a decade. With its recent 1.0 release, Phoenix is gaining a lot of momentum. If you want some idea of…
Crystal, on the other hand, is as if I'm writing Ruby.