11–20 of 109 posts
> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL Impossible, or just hard?
> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL Impossible, or just hard?
Now think about this in the context of a REPL, which again stands for Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop. If you write code and evaluate it right away, this whole business about checking your work won't work right. You would basically have to recompile your entire program on every REPL eval, which defeats the whole purpose of a REPL. There are lots of other tricks to getting this to work, as the article hints at, but they're all very unsatisfactory in delivering the freedom of a dynamic language.
> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL Impossible, or just hard?
I would question what is meant by a 'true REPL'. It's certainly seems possible to build a REPL of a statically typed compiled language.
> Recently Crystal shocked the world when it rose from 60th place to 32nd place in the Tiobe index in a mere month Meteoric! Because we all know the the Tiobe index is incredibly accurate. Would have been nice to see some code examples, rather than just handwavey bullets points that you could write about nearly every up-and-coming programming language.
Also, "meteoric rise" is kind of silly. That's not how meteors work.
> Nothing else puts all of these ingredients together (compile-time macros, static typing, C-like speed, Ruby-like syntax, gem-like package ecosystem, native binary compilation, fibers, and cross-platform support) Something I've noticed when reading 'X language is great' posts, the comparison is usually limited to a narrow subset of what's out there. As an example, I think D meets all of the above criteria. Maybe I'l…
First of all, the problem isn't that it's "compiled" - Python is "compiled" too, but still has one of the best REPLs available.
The problem is that the language is static. But static (and compiled) languages can have REPLs, for example C++ has an excellent REPL called Cling.
It's not impossible, just requires some more effort.
As for Crystal, it looks like a neat language. However, if it's going to try to compete with the fast compiled runtimes such as Java, it will need some parallelism support.
> Recently Crystal shocked the world when it rose from 60th place to 32nd place in the Tiobe index in a mere month Meteoric! Because we all know the the Tiobe index is incredibly accurate. Would have been nice to see some code examples, rather than just handwavey bullets points that you could write about nearly every up-and-coming programming language.
More importantly, the TIOBE index is just a web noise indicator. A dedicated marketing guy focused on dumping the project's keywords throughout the WWW is all it takes to manipulate the ranking.
> Nothing else puts all of these ingredients together (compile-time macros, static typing, C-like speed, Ruby-like syntax, gem-like package ecosystem, native binary compilation, fibers, and cross-platform support) Something I've noticed when reading 'X language is great' posts, the comparison is usually limited to a narrow subset of what's out there. As an example, I think D meets all of the above criteria. Maybe I'l…
So other that the gem-like package ecosystem and a syntax familiar to Ruby developers, it isn't particularly new.
> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL Impossible, or just hard?
You'd need an interpreted runtime for the language for that to work. D has a 'scripting' runtime but I'm not sure if anyone's done a REPL or what the limitations would be.
I didn't realise that SBCL is interpreted.
> Nothing else puts all of these ingredients together (compile-time macros, static typing, C-like speed, Ruby-like syntax, gem-like package ecosystem, native binary compilation, fibers, and cross-platform support) Something I've noticed when reading 'X language is great' posts, the comparison is usually limited to a narrow subset of what's out there. As an example, I think D meets all of the above criteria. Maybe I'l…
"Is FFI cheap on all interesting platforms?" is a better question, than "Does it compile to CPU-native binary on all interesting platforms?". In this space you only kinda get some JVM languages, but on Windows you would have to do something more special. Scheme to some extent. Also Haxe.
If you don't care about it you can read the rest of this thread with all other favorite languages. I for one cheer for Myrddin, Pony and Zig.
I was thinking lately about an imperative language, that would be easily compiled to other first class languages. To serve as a cross-platform core of application. It would be quite limited - for example no heap allocations. Something maybe akin to Google's Wuffs language. Just an idea on the one edge of the problem.