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Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

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Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#161

Post by asdf1234 »

continuations wrote: post #38
clessg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, you're right that Elixir is not a computationally fast language. If you're looking for fast, raw number-crunching, look elsewhere. That said, real-world performance tends to be extremely good for real-time and networked applications (read: web apps). It's common for requests to be handled in microseconds, even in development.

Is Elixir really fast for web apps though? According to the web framework benchmark [1] the performance of Elixir is pretty bad - it's consistently slower than python and ruby frameworks. [1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...

Erlang/Elixir is much, much faster than either Python or Ruby especially when it comes to workloads like your typical web app.

In the Techempower benchmarks the Phoenix tests had a ton of errors and there was no preview run so whoever submitted them wasn't able to fix them. Look at the error column. I assume they'll be fixed in the next run.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#163

Post by iamd3vil »

lmm wrote: post #149
clessg wrote: post #4

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…

Is Elixir actually any more mainstream/momentum-having than Crystal? I'd be more inclined to point people to e.g. OCaml.

I don't know if Elixir is mainstream or not, but there are a lot of companies using Elixir in production (including the company I work for). You can find the list of companies at https://github.com/doomspork/elixir-companies

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#164

Post by exDM69 »

bluetomcat wrote: post #136
progman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There actually is one high-level Python-like language that really is almost "as fast as C". http://nim-lang.org I am using it for years already, and it is really performant, somewhere between C and Rust. I am still wondering why so few people use it. Benchmark: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks Nim vs Rust: http://arthurtw.github.io/2015/01/12/quick-comparison-nim-vs... Performance discussion: http://forum.nim-lan…

Shameless plug: is it considered totally uncool in 2016 for one to be developing a memory-unsafe, manual MM, non-OO, thread-denying language that preserves most of the C semantics? https://github.com/bbu/quaint-lang

No, definitely not!

I'd be very interested in a language that is roughly as low level as C, but has some obvious warts "fixed" while still being able to run on bare metal or with a minimal runtime system. I also don't care about a standard lib as long as I can call open(), close(), read(), write(), socket(), etc.

Native threads is another requirement for me.

Things I'd like to see in a language:

- compile to native executable

- type inference

- module system without header files

- easy to call into native C code, and export functions so they can be called from C or any other language

- first class SIMD structures (this is missing from Rust!), so that you don't have to duplicate code for sin4f and sin8f (which would be line-by-line equal, except types)

- perhaps some kind of modern polymorphism (ie. not class based OOP)

- can target GPUs via LLVM or SPIR-V

- memory safety is optional, but nice to have. I'd be mostly interested in using this kind of language for GPU kernels and tight inner loops, where you wouldn't be allocating anyways

I have a bunch of design ideas and prototypes in my drawer waiting for a lot of free time and inspiration appearing.

I like my tools sharp, even if it means there's going to be blood occasionally.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#165

Post by iamd3vil »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #128
clessg wrote: post #4

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…

The biggest practical downside with Elixir relative to Crystal is lack of types. The per-thread GC is an important advantage, though.

Elixir has optional typing though. You can type check with Erlang's Dialyzer.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#166

Post by eggy »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #25
clessg wrote: post #4

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…

Elixir gets plugged so often in other-language threads - whether it's Julia or Ruby or, like here, Crystal - that if it wasn't FOSS I'd have decided it's being astroturfed. I guess it's a good thing that people like it so much, but it's really starting to feel marketing-y by now.

I have similar feelings about it, but I have chalked them up to the web-dev crowd where there are more numbers of Ruby/ROR devs flocking to it. It has the same uptake as Ruby/ROR did at certain times.

Case in point, LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) was created by one of the original designers of Erlang, Robert Virding, has great support for a small FOSS project, true macros, but the popularity of Ruby has rocketed Elixir way ahead in terms of repositories and users. Erlang Solutions has it on the site, but it is not as touted as Elixir. People go with what they know, and let's admit it, Lisp is a great language, but not as popular in the web-dev crowd sans Clojure (which I don't see as so Lispy).

From the early looks of it, having come from industry and academia, Pony lang looks poised to muscle in on Erlang/BEAM/OTP, Elixir and LFE anyway. I personally don't like the syntax, but syntax is not semantics, and you get over it.

Popularity doesn't always win the day if you do something a bit more off the main road, and potential to earn more researching what you love: Look at qdb/k devs and jobs, and Haskell has started increasing in uptake by fintech. Go with what you like, or as Joseph Campbell said, 'Follow your bliss' and the rest will fall into place.

But don't listen to me. I spend many waking moments fiddling with J (jsoftware.com). Not actually the most loved or known PL out there. I think the array languages J/APL/K/Q will have their day due to where software and hardware are heading: Multicores, array processing (GPU/FPGA hybrids, custom computers).

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#167

Post by StavrosK »

Ygg2 wrote: post #138
the_duke wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you meant -> 'extreymely difficult to get INcorrect in the way rust does'

Unless this is a joke, its meaning is correct, i.e. "proven correct like Rust".

I think he misunderstood the comment to mean "it's hard to get memory allocation wrong when writing a Rust program".

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#168

Post by exDM69 »

welder wrote: post #79

Stopped reading when I saw the `end` keyword... the most annoying part of Ruby. Edit: I'm getting hella downvoted but I'm leaving this here. Ruby fanboys can't silence me!!! ;)

The syntax of a language is about the least interesting thing about them. I don't care about curly braces, end keywords or semicolons as long as it is consistent (and fairly easy to parse, so there can be good tooling). The interesting parts are in the semantics, type systems and runtime features.

Choosing a programming language based on the syntax is like choosing your significant other based on looks alone. You're going to be spending a lot of time together, what's inside is what counts.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#169

Post by StavrosK »

rdtsc wrote: post #36
sundarurfriend wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir gets plugged so often in other-language threads - whether it's Julia or Ruby or, like here, Crystal - that if it wasn't FOSS I'd have decided it's being astroturfed. I guess it's a good thing that people like it so much, but it's really starting to feel marketing-y by now.

> that if it wasn't FOSS I'd have decided it's being astroturfed. That's a good sign! You know why? Because it has a great community and is very friendly for new comers. Jose, Eric and the rest of the team made that a priority and it shows. It doesn't just mean being nice on IRC, it also means putting usability first, putting more effort in how example looks, how documentation looks and so on. If Google invented a la…

"Friendly for newcomers"? I tried to write something the other day, and had an Erlang developer friend to help me. The Elixir docs section just says "buy one of these books to get started", which is completely unacceptable, and we (mostly my friend, as I had no idea what anything is) spent an hour trying to figure out how to run a node, with Google not providing any useful answers.

That's as hostile to newcomers as it gets. Contrast this with the Rust book, that gets you from "I have no idea how anything works" to "hey I just wrote a small program!" in a few minutes.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#170

Post by exDM69 »

anp wrote: post #8

From this post, Crystal appears to have some of the things many people have been lusting after in Rust: sophisticated metaprogramming, fewer sigils, a bigger standard library, fibers/coroutines/whatever-they're-called-now. But it still has a GC :(. Rust has completely spoiled me with making it easy to minimize dynamic memory allocation and copies, and to know (almost always) deterministically when something will go a…

About GC: it would be nice if there would be some kind of standard-ish implementation framework for a GC in an LLVM language.

LLVM has been enabling fantastic new programming languages, and while it has support for a GC, I have not found a GC library that would be easy to embed in a new compiler/runtime environment.

Now there are dozens of LLVM-based languages (or language prototypes) that have different, incompatible implementations of GC with varying degrees of quality. If there was a relatively simple but efficient GC available, it would be much easier to implement a new language on LLVM.

At one point there was a project called HLVM, but it was targetted at implementing JVM and .NET -style virtual machines. This is not what I'm looking for and I think the project is dead now.

If anyone knows about a GC implementation for LLVM, I'd really like to take a look. If it's a part of a programming language project but would be relatively easy to rip out of the rest of the compiler/runtime, it's not a problem.

That said, I prefer languages without GC.

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