Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
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Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
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Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#2The really important questions in any modern language:
(0) Does Crystal have a lot of undefined behavior like C?
(1) Does understanding Crystal programs require a lot of trial and error just like in Ruby?
(2) How good a job does Crystal do at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot?
A language isn't to be judged just by the amazing programs you can write in it. (Turing-completeness and I/O facilities have that covered.) Far more important are the totally stupid programs that you can't write in it.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#3The really important questions in any modern language: (0) Does Crystal have a lot of undefined behavior like C? (1) Does understanding Crystal programs require a lot of trial and error just like in Ruby? (2) How good a job does Crystal do at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot? A language isn't to be judged just by the amazing programs you can write in it. (Turing-completeness and I/O facilities have that…
Is undefined behavior a thing outside of C? Is that really something you should question rather then just assume that modern language have no undefined behavior?
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#4Looks 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 performance differences between Phoenix and Rails, see [2] and [3].
[1] http://www.phoenixframework.org/
[2] https://github.com/mroth/phoenix-showdown/blob/master/RESULT...
[3] http://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-w...
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#5What advantages Crystal has compared to other more modern languages that aim to compete with C? For example D and Rust.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#6The claim is "fast as C", so I was surprised that the performance comparison was with Ruby, not with C. On my machine, the Ruby Fibonacci program executes in 47.5s, while a corresponding C program executes in 0.88s - that's a factor 54 difference, while the article reports a factor 35 for Crystal. That's good, but what causes the difference? This benchmark is pretty much all function call overhead, so I doubt it's representative of real performance-sensitive code.
The Crystal website itself makes a more modest claim than "fast as C" under its language goals: "Compile to efficient native code", which it clearly does.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#7The really important questions in any modern language: (0) Does Crystal have a lot of undefined behavior like C? (1) Does understanding Crystal programs require a lot of trial and error just like in Ruby? (2) How good a job does Crystal do at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot? A language isn't to be judged just by the amazing programs you can write in it. (Turing-completeness and I/O facilities have that…
Is undefined behavior a thing outside of C? Is that really something you should question rather then just assume that modern language have no undefined behavior?
What happens if you try to mutate a shared object from two threads, without using mutexes and locks, in languages without either Rust's compiler-enforced ownership or a global interpreter lock?
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#8From 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 away.
EDIT: I should also say that if you want to bash on Rust's lack of these things, 3 out of the 4 items I cited have solutions being actively worked on (either at planning, RFC, or implementation phase). I don't think Rust's sigils are going away any time soon, but I have no idea how you'd do that and preserve semantics anyway.
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is undefined behavior a thing outside of C? Is that really something you should question rather then just assume that modern language have no undefined behavior?
What happens if you try to mutate a shared object from two threads, without using mutexes and locks, in languages without either Rust's compiler-enforced ownership or a global interpreter lock?
ConcurrentModificationException?
Re: Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if you try to mutate a shared object from two threads, without using mutexes and locks, in languages without either Rust's compiler-enforced ownership or a global interpreter lock?
ConcurrentModificationException?
That's hardly any better than undefined behavior. It's not the program you want to write, under any possible circumstance, and the language should tell you so.