What advantages Crystal has compared to other more modern languages that aim to compete with C? For example D and Rust.
I don't think it's really trying to compete with C, it's a much higher level language, just one that happens to be fast as well.
Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
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Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I'm currently trying to think of a good way to add it to Myrddin, which currently makes it more or less manual. Doing it in a simple way is a tough problem. The simplest solution is to add the moral equivalent of 'null' -- objects that transition to an idempotently destructable state, which solves a lot of complexity with the data flow and analysis (yay!) at the cost of some safety (boo), and nulls (louder boo).
My language (Lily) handles the problem by trying to avoid the gc where it can. Lily is statically-typed, built-in classes can't be inherited from, and there's no C-like casting. With those rules in mind, most objects can't become cyclical. It's impossible for a list of strings to loop back onto itself, for example. It helps that the value classes backing enums (like Option and Either) are immutable, which I so far su…
One of the goals I have is to keep the required runtime absolutely minimal, as well -- I'm ok with the compiler inserting some user-defined code in the appropriate places to initialize or release values, but I'd like to avoid growing the required code in https://github.com/oridb/mc/tree/master/rt unless it's absolutely necessary.
And yes, that ~60 lines per platform is really all that's needed. (And actually, I should be able to merge more of it for SysV platforms.)
So, I've thought about a GC, but I'd really prefer not to have it.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#73From 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…
Manual or deterministic memory management might be a must-have for certain usage domains, but for any domain in which one would be using ruby, this seems unlikely, and presumably one could FFI into C when this is the case. There are hardly any languages commonly used in industry which don't have GC (essentially just C/C++). And many of these garbage-collected languages are capable of blazingly fast code with a small…
Obj-C? Or do you count ARC as a GC?
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#74I'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…
Maybe the makers of Crystal need to take a leaf out of Go's book. Despite the Go creators not being windows users (AFAIK), they support Windows as a primary target, to help adoption, I assume. Of course the Crystal people probably don't have the same number of developers working on it as Go did even early on. Edit: Go took a little while to support windows, not until around July 2010. See this question from November…
Windows support was implemented by the community, Not the creators.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? Ask any C programmer if they could wave their magic wand and turn every single undefined behavior in their programs into a segfault how much better their life would be. It's not a small improvement it's a huge improvement.
Thats simply not true. UB is simply the latest stick to hit C with. In day-to-day working nobody worries about UB at all as you generally don't notice it. Same with lack of a GC; this is a plus point for C for most applications, not a negative. (and yes, I do have plenty of experience in it, I've been using it for the past 20 years, have you?).
> UB is simply the latest stick to hit C with.
Honest question, which is the case?
(0) You find it easy to determine, by visual inspection, whether a piece of code has undefined behavior.
(1) Your coding practices make it difficult to accidentally introduce undefined behavior in the first place.
> Same with lack of a GC; this is a plus point for C for most applications, not a negative.
Agreed. C addresses use cases for which GC (or any other feature requiring heavy runtime support) is simply unacceptable.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why you're grouping those four languages as they overlap very little. Go has latency and emphasizes network bound services (and randomly docker for some reason, I'm sure a good one); rust is a c replacement; swift is for writing iOS/Mac apps; and crystal is a newborn. I'd actually call it quite close to go: a high emphasis on concurrency and services. Single thread performance matters much less when scal…
I listed a few examples of emerging languages to clarify that Elixir is not in the same class when it comes to computational performance on a single machine. The performance profile is indeed Erlang-like. Keep also in mind that my reply was within the context of a thread on Crystal. OP sort of sold Elixir as a fast language that we can use now while we wait for Crystal to mature. My point is not that Elixir is useles…
Yup, this makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the author of Kemal(kemalcr.com), a simple, fast and modern web framework for Crystal. We've been using Crystal in production(at Protel) for more than 6 months for some heavy load APIs (100-200 req/s). We've replaced our Rails API with 64 unicorns to just 1 Kemal process and it's not even breaking any sweat while consuming nearly 100x less resource and 30x less CPU. You can ask me about our experience.
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…
These are really nice questions / concerns.
- Firstly, we are a Ruby shop and most of the time the errors are pretty self descriptive that we can easily solve. Also the IRC/Gitter room is full of helpful people that you can get instant feedback about any issue (even a compiler bug). Note that we're not afraid of writing code :)
- I've updated our application once in the last 6 months. It's only a minor change for adding type annotations which took like 10 minutes.
- Actually i think that Crystal is already in beta quality (for us). Calling it Alpha is really an understatement.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How am I supposed to learn the language's semantics from a lexer? Not what I wanted to achieve, but the lexer contains some frequently used methods and is fairly simple and straight-forward, but if you want to learn the semantics why not just go to their docs? https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/index.htm... > Consider this use case: I spawn five fibers. Can I send the same mutable object to all five…
> but if you want to learn the semantics why not just go to their docs? https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/index.htm... Yep, fair enough. I'm somewhat worried about how abstract classes work: https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/virtual_a... Apparently, Crystal can infer the methods of an abstract class from the methods of its subclasses. In the Animal/Dog/Cat example, what happens if, i…
> In the Animal/Dog/Cat example, what happens if, in a separate module, if define a Snake class that doesn't have a `talk` method? There are several possibilities, sadly all pretty bad
The abstract class defines which methods every class that inherits from it must define by using abstract methods. If you write a class that inherits from an abstract class, and you do not define a method that the abstract class says that you absolutely must define, the compiler will raise an error for you. You can inherit from classes between modules.
> I'm asking about the errors that the language prevents, not the community's conventions.
I haven't actually tried it, definitely something I'll check out another time. I understand your concern though!
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#79Stopped 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!!! ;)
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#80I'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…
For the ones who started to wonder about the Windows support, it is tracked here: