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The Crystal Programming Language

crystal-lang.org

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Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#2

Post by kibwen »

Crystal looks like a neat language, and it's fun to see how many entrants there are in the modern renaissance of scripting languages that compile to native code. I wish there was some more documentation about it though... for example, does the bullet point "Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument" from the home page imply gradual typing as per Dart and TypeScript, or is it something else entirely?

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#5

Post by asterite »

kibwen wrote: post #2

Crystal looks like a neat language, and it's fun to see how many entrants there are in the modern renaissance of scripting languages that compile to native code. I wish there was some more documentation about it though... for example, does the bullet point "Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument" from the home page imply gradual typing as per Dart and TypeScript, or is it something else entir…

It has global type inference, there's nothing dynamic in the language. You can specify type restrictions to allow overloading methods, for example, or doing multiple dispatch. But in the general case you don't specify types (except for generic type arguments) and the compiler figures out everything.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#6

Post by rajahafify »

_RPM wrote: post #3

How long did it take to become self hosting? I checked the first tag on GitHub and it was still implemented in Crystal. Did you originally implement it in C or another language?

From what I understand in another post of their's, Crystal used to be written in ruby, before they successfully compiled it using Crystal.

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#7

Post by asterite »

_RPM wrote: post #3

How long did it take to become self hosting? I checked the first tag on GitHub and it was still implemented in Crystal. Did you originally implement it in C or another language?

It took about one year. We originally implemented the compiler in Ruby and because of its similarity with Crystal (or the other way around ;-)) porting it to Crystal was pretty easy in the end.

There's this tag: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/releases/tag/ruby

You can read about the bootstrapping moment here: http://crystal-lang.org/2013/11/14/good-bye-ruby-thursday.ht...

Re: The Crystal Programming Language

#10

Post by kibwen »

asterite wrote: post #5
kibwen wrote: post #2

Crystal looks like a neat language, and it's fun to see how many entrants there are in the modern renaissance of scripting languages that compile to native code. I wish there was some more documentation about it though... for example, does the bullet point "Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument" from the home page imply gradual typing as per Dart and TypeScript, or is it something else entir…

It has global type inference, there's nothing dynamic in the language. You can specify type restrictions to allow overloading methods, for example, or doing multiple dispatch. But in the general case you don't specify types (except for generic type arguments) and the compiler figures out everything.

I'm curious how possible it is in practice to write large software that relies exclusively on global type inference. Does the compiler itself go without ever explicitly specifying a type?
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