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Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

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Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#201

Post by qaq »

rdtsc wrote: post #41
acangiano wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir is not a fast language. Not even close. Yes, it handles concurrency and parallelism beautifully which in turn enable distributed applications to perform quite well. But the language itself is significantly slower than Crystal / Rust / Go / Swift. It's not in the same category at all. That said, it's a great language worth recommending.

> Elixir is not a fast language. Depends what we mean by fast. I have seen Erlang VM handle 100k requests per second on a distributed cluster. That's plenty fast. Moreover, because of fault tolerance, it means ability to have a better uptime, with less people on-call. "Fast" can also be measured to include that, if system goes 200k requests per second, but crashes at midnight and stays down for a few hours, the avera…

Phoenix is slightly faster than Gin (Go web framework) so depending on your use case it can be fast :). Obviously one of the primary selling points is OTP/BEAM VM with all the concurrency, HA, soft realtime etc. but with simpler syntax than Erlang.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#202

Post by qaq »

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.

Not sure why people would discuss it in Julia threads,but for Ruby and Crystal >50% of Elixir community came from Ruby so basically it's Ruby devs discussing newer alternatives to Ruby.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#203

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

progman wrote: post #90
bluetomcat wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these "fast as C" claims about modern, high-level Python-like languages (be they statically typed and natively compiled) are missing the point. It is mostly the minimalistic and terse programming style that C encourages that makes C programs performant. You avoid allocations wherever possible, you write your own custom allocators and memory pools for frequently allocated objects, you avoid copying stuff as muc…

> You avoid allocations wherever possible If you don't have to write cutting-edge games or embedded software for tiny systems, why do you have to care about allocations at all? Today's systems and RAM's are so fast that garbage collections don't really matter in most cases. Consider SBCL (compiled Common Lisp) which is almost as performant as Java and C++. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/lisp.html I used…

RAII and smart pointers go a long way towards eliminating the need for GC in c++.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#204

Post by dmux »

Svenskunganka wrote: post #15

I'd like to put out there that Crystal is absolutely awesome. The language itself is Crystal clear, but the language documentation and API documentation - oh my! 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 overw…

You mention learning a lot about compiled languages, and mention afterwards being able to understand packages. How are those two related?

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#205

Post by CyberDildonics »

exDM69 wrote: post #164
bluetomcat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

You've almost described ISPC verbatim. If you don't already know about it you might want to check it out. http://ispc.github.io/index.html

It doesn't compile to a native executable, but since it produces .o files you should be able to just set your entry point and go from there.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#206

Post by nilved »

ricardobeat wrote: post #129
_uhtu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest concern if i were to try to use Crystal in production would be the lack of "googleability". I'm guessing your team is very familiar with the language, so it's not as much of a problem that you can't Google a problem when it happens. Do you feel that this is a major roadblock for people new to crystal, or are the majority of errors very intuitive? the second thing is that according to the site crystal is in…

Chiming in re. "googleability", go has the same problem (despite coming from Google :D). What you do is always search for 'crystal lang xxx'. It will get better as adoption increases.

I think OP isn't referring to the name but the fact that there are no results.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#207

Post by jjnoakes »

p0nce wrote: post #191
jjnoakes wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You speak as if a GC is unconditionally better than alternatives and it is a solved problem but using a GC has issues as well. On the theoretical side, not reasoning about ownership means sharing data betweent threads is done with copies (slower) or locking (slower and error prone); if you know about ownership you can share references to data while it can't be mutated for free. Ownership is also important for any non…

> On the theoretical side, not reasoning about ownership means sharing data betweent threads is done with copies (slower) or locking (slower and error prone); if you know about ownership you can share references to data while it can't be mutated for free. I don't think it follows and it's rather the reverse: it what I share has a global owner (ie. the GC), I don't have to lock or copy by definition: once it stops bei…

> if what I share has a global owner (ie. the GC), I don't have to lock or copy by definition

Then how you do avoid data races? Two shared references which can mutate your shared data requires either a copy, a lock, immutability, or a single writer.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#208

Post by klibertp »

acangiano wrote: post #24
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 is not a fast language. Not even close. Yes, it handles concurrency and parallelism beautifully which in turn enable distributed applications to perform quite well. But the language itself is significantly slower than Crystal / Rust / Go / Swift. It's not in the same category at all. That said, it's a great language worth recommending.

Hm, what about HiPE and ability to natively compile Erlang modules? That's pretty solid technology by now (I think?) and it promised some good results last time I checked. Honestly asking - I did quite a few things with Erlang and a little less with Elixir, but never even tried to use them for raw speed, instead delegating number crunching to other processes via ports.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#209

Post by Svenskunganka »

dmux wrote: post #204
Svenskunganka wrote: post #15

I'd like to put out there that Crystal is absolutely awesome. The language itself is Crystal clear, but the language documentation and API documentation - oh my! 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 overw…

You mention learning a lot about compiled languages, and mention afterwards being able to understand packages. How are those two related?

I meant the packages of the stdlib, not community-made packages. A great example is the things I learned about the IO module and how it plays with the other modules in the stdlib for Crystal that I could easily see a similarity in behavior and methods in the Go implementation, but not being able to fully understand before I had a go with Crystal.

The way they interact with different types, fibers and allocation on the stack vs heap, etc. Makes sense?

Edit: To give you an example of how friendly the Crystal lang & API documentation is to developers unfamilliar with the language, let's look at the Iterator: https://crystal-lang.org/api/0.18.7/Iterator.html

It comes with a great "introduction" to what it is, what it does and gives an example of the advantages it has over the Enumerable. It also explains how you can implement your own Iterator.

We can also look at the IO module for Crystal and the io package for Go: https://crystal-lang.org/api/0.18.7/IO.html https://golang.org/pkg/io/

From a beginners standpoint, you have to see that the Crystal documentation is way more friendlier.

Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

#210

Post by wmoxam »

erelde wrote: post #18
happywolf wrote: post #5

What advantages Crystal has compared to other more modern languages that aim to compete with C? For example D and Rust.

Its similarity with Ruby? It doesn't _feel_ like I would have to learn completely new paradigms

It's somewhat similar, but in Crystal you need to be explicit with types, and you'll likely miss 'send'.

Also Crystal has macros

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