The Crystal Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#121

Post by steveklabnik » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

FraaJad wrote: post #117

sergiotapia wrote: post #46

I'm looking for something beautiful like Ruby but fast like Go. Do you think Crystal fits this bill? Also, are there packages/libs/gems for Crystal? What are they called? What do I google for? One of the major reasons why I dumped Go is that it's just too verbose and makes me write too much boilerplate code. I want to sort a collection and I have to write the same algorithm every single time for every single type. It…

will beautiful like python and faster than Go do? then Nim - http://nim-lang.org will do just fine. Anecdotal benchmarks like this one https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks will show you that Nim comes out at the top (so does Crystal for some, FWIW).

As always, take benchmarks with a grain of salt: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/26

Or this discussion (which is two months old, so unsure what exactly has changed since. Looking at commits, not much?) http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/30y9mk/go_vs_ru...

Or this one, though it goes off track a bit: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/38s1n3/why_is_rust_muc...

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#122

Post by kentt » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #86

Lrigikithumer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elegant to program with. Not write a parser for.

An ambiguous syntax is not elegant to program with. Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno!

Have you written Ruby often and still felt like this? I'm asking because I'm newer to Ruby and this does come up a fair bit, but I was assuming that with time the ambiguity would disappear.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#123

Post by adamlett » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #86

Lrigikithumer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elegant to program with. Not write a parser for.

An ambiguous syntax is not elegant to program with. Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno!

Among people who like Ruby, this is seen as a feature, not a bug. It makes refactorings easier when you change something from a local variable to a method call and don't have to search for all the places you would have to add parentheses in a language like Java. Granted, you could argue that your IDE should take care of that for you with automatic refactorings, but to a Rubyist this is a crutch and also something that forces her to use a particular IDE instead of her favorite editor.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#124

Post by aikah » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:23 PM UTC

I'm a go user right now, but I really want to ditch it because I'm in total disarray with the way the go language is managed and the deafness of the go team. Been looking at D,Nim and Crystal.

- D is neat but I'm not interested at all in unsafe stuffs and don't want to have to debug programs or 3rd party libs that relies on that, I want a safe language.

- Nim looks really good, although some features like (foo_bar = FooBar ) are just disgusting

- While Crystal is new and libs is non existent, it feels like a good candidate for the long run. I hope it will have the same concurrency capabilities as go. Good luck with the language.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#125

Post by Vulume » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #32

reagency wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GHC does global type inference, and has very sophisticated types.

My point was specifically in regard to the feasibility of omitting the types in all cases. I see types often in Haskell code, likely because the community regards that as a best practice (in contrast to Crystal).

In Haskell types are used a lot as documentation and to make static guarantees about the program logic, not just runtime safety. If you're only worrying about illegal operations you practically don't need signatures.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#126

Post by chrisseaton » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

asterite wrote: post #119

chrisseaton wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk about how Crystal's performance is better because it's statically compiled and removes Ruby's dynamic features, but I'm not sure static compilation is the best way to achieve performance, and I don't think the dynamic features need to damage performance. For example, JRuby+Truffle runs Crystal's own sample programs around twice as fast as Crystal does, without static compilation, and while still supportin…

Did you compile the Crystal program with the --release flag? That turns on optimizations. On our machines we see Crystal is faster in this benchmark, it always takes about 1.6s while JRuby+Truffle reaches 2.38 at most.

No, I didn't, sorry!

I don't see that option documented anywhere except the changelog, and one passing reference in the docs that says it sets the release flag, but neither say it has any effect on optimisation.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#127

Post by Vulume » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

agrafix wrote: post #80

reagency wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GHC does global type inference, and has very sophisticated types.

...and is a slow compiler compared to for example Go :-(

That's a problem with Cabal, not GHC. They're working on it.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#128

Post by zero_iq » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

Wow, I started designing a language called Crystal in the 90s, which a) looks similar to this, and b) I'm pretty sure I even bought the domain crystal-lang.org at one point, but I never did anything with it! I had a very similar logo too :)

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#129

Post by asterite » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #126

asterite wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you compile the Crystal program with the --release flag? That turns on optimizations. On our machines we see Crystal is faster in this benchmark, it always takes about 1.6s while JRuby+Truffle reaches 2.38 at most.

No, I didn't, sorry! I don't see that option documented anywhere except the changelog, and one passing reference in the docs that says it sets the release flag, but neither say it has any effect on optimisation.

Yeah, we need to document this better, sorry!

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#130

Post by p0nce » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #124

I'm a go user right now, but I really want to ditch it because I'm in total disarray with the way the go language is managed and the deafness of the go team. Been looking at D,Nim and Crystal. - D is neat but I'm not interested at all in unsafe stuffs and don't want to have to debug programs or 3rd party libs that relies on that, I want a safe language. - Nim looks really good, although some features like (foo_bar =…

D has a memory safe subset (@safe). You could argue that Rust 3rd party libs rely on unsafe blocks.