11–20 of 79 posts
I think Crystal is a very practical language to work in for web. It doesn't have the polish of Go (yet), but it feels more approachable to me. Rust has its place with low-level systems work, but Crystal gives you something that is reasonable to write and still compiles to a binary. In turn, it performs well and is easy to distribute, deploy, and containerize as well.
I think Crystal is a very practical language to work in for web. It doesn't have the polish of Go (yet), but it feels more approachable to me. Rust has its place with low-level systems work, but Crystal gives you something that is reasonable to write and still compiles to a binary. In turn, it performs well and is easy to distribute, deploy, and containerize as well.
I think Crystal is a very practical language to work in for web. It doesn't have the polish of Go (yet), but it feels more approachable to me. Rust has its place with low-level systems work, but Crystal gives you something that is reasonable to write and still compiles to a binary. In turn, it performs well and is easy to distribute, deploy, and containerize as well.
If I'm already using, say, OCaml, why would I want to switch to Crystal? (assuming that multicore takes the same amount of time to arrive in each). Whenever I've read about Crystal it sounds like a broadly sensible language, but it doesn't sound like it brings anything new to the table - in which case I'll favour the more mature language with the bigger library/tool ecosystem.
A fast and typed Ruby, isn't it enough? ;)
I think Crystal is a very practical language to work in for web. It doesn't have the polish of Go (yet), but it feels more approachable to me. Rust has its place with low-level systems work, but Crystal gives you something that is reasonable to write and still compiles to a binary. In turn, it performs well and is easy to distribute, deploy, and containerize as well.
Second of which is `yield`, ruby's extremely powerful way of passing code to functions. In crystal, functions which take blocks are actually inlined, meaning that abstractions such as `3.times {}` or `5.upto(20, step: 5) { |i| ... }` have zero cost. For example, take a look at how simple the HTTP server example is on the crystal homepage. Very useful for building DSLs.
Macros are another powerful (but hopefully not overused) tool for building clean programs. Crystal macros receive AST nodes but return source code as text. This text is then compiled and placed inside the program. This may sound like it would have the disadvantages of C macros, but as they're more integrated into the language, the compiler can insert the generated AST of the compiled macro into the original AST in a clean way. Using "dumb" text templating has several advantages: it's really easy to use because you're essentially just writing crystal code, and it's powerful as you get access to the AST. It also has the advantage that it's actually quite hard to make large scale modifications to a method body, preventing a lot of the silly macro uses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm already using, say, OCaml, why would I want to switch to Crystal? (assuming that multicore takes the same amount of time to arrive in each). Whenever I've read about Crystal it sounds like a broadly sensible language, but it doesn't sound like it brings anything new to the table - in which case I'll favour the more mature language with the bigger library/tool ecosystem.
> it doesn't sound like it brings anything new to the table A fast and typed Ruby, isn't it enough? ;)
I think Crystal is a very practical language to work in for web. It doesn't have the polish of Go (yet), but it feels more approachable to me. Rust has its place with low-level systems work, but Crystal gives you something that is reasonable to write and still compiles to a binary. In turn, it performs well and is easy to distribute, deploy, and containerize as well.
If I'm already using, say, OCaml, why would I want to switch to Crystal? (assuming that multicore takes the same amount of time to arrive in each). Whenever I've read about Crystal it sounds like a broadly sensible language, but it doesn't sound like it brings anything new to the table - in which case I'll favour the more mature language with the bigger library/tool ecosystem.