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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why anyone would actually use it in the current state, unstable, lack of libraries, lack of community and the biggest problem no multi-threading / windows support

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I know you’re (effectively) trolling here, but there are many reasons to “actually” use it. The community is great and helpful (check out the Gitter activity if you have any question about that). Lack of Windows support (for now) doesn’t matter if....you don’t use Windows. Multi-threading is being worked on.

You’re rehashing the same 2 things many folks point out that Crystal is missing in its pre-1.0 state and while they’re obviously important for widespread adoption, they’re not reason in and of themselves to dismiss a language that’s otherwise super interesting to many.

Ruby is pretty useless on Windows too to be fair.

Good luck trying to compile native libraries.

I'm actually not trolling, I'm 100% serious, there is no reason to use that language right now when you have others languages that are better on every aspect. Maybe Crystal will be ready at some point but right now it's not.

I don't think any language feels as close as crystal does to dynamic languages while being completely type safe with strong types. I think thats why so many people choose to use it so early. It truly doesn't feel like any other language out there.

For the thrill man! If it doesn't have a library you need you create it yourself. Eventually enough people who have the skill to contribute will become interested in Crystal and contribute a library, then one day crystal will replace java. In all seriousness, other than the multithreaded windows support, which libraries are missing?

For sure. I've had a lot of fun getting to be the person to create some basic libraries for things like image manipulation and an ORM for mongodb when I find no one else has done that yet.

One big thing that is missing still is full google cloud platform and AWS libraries. There is an s3 connector but I think it's out of date.

We use it in production. The web framework side of crystal is IMO more mature than what you find in Node.js, Python, etc. About a year ago we tried moving everything to Express because it's super easy to find fledgling js developers, but Express simply lacked most of the features we needed, even when supplemented by npm, whereas Amber did everything we needed literally out of the box.

Edit: Sails is not what it claims to be, and doesn't live up to the dream at all

> Sails.js is probably the closest thing to sane in the JS web framework ecosystem

Whoa, that's where you lost me. Sails has a reputation for being horrible, and after working on a production app using Sails, I agree. Perhaps you were wanting something like Rails but in JS, which is what Sails claims to be, but it barely lives up to that. I don't know if there are other frameworks that try to be the Rails of JS but it wouldn't be hard to better than Sails. I'm interested in hearing why you think it's so sane (no snark, I'm sincerely curious)

I'm going to retract my statement about Sails. I had a lot of trouble with it when I went to use it, but I thought it was just me. It seems it really is crappy as well.

Why’s that?

You could basically say the same about any language. Just switch the descriptions. For example:

C#: verbose, magical dependency injection, Microsoft, etc.

Ruby: slow

Go: ugly syntax, verbose, if err != nil, etc.

If a language works for you I see no reason not to use it :-)

Ruby's getting much faster now with recent speed improvements, JIT and recent developments by the TruffleRuby team

Why would those who do use and are happy with it, judging from the responses here, not use it?

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