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Comment by justaaron | Hacker News Reader

Your parent comment has a point about performance; I don't see why he is downvoted. Crystal is cool, but it is still immature in terms of ecosystem, the language could change, limited library support, and most importantly, not many great engineers. Particularly not outside of the valley.

Performance is a concern for many people, and this is somewhat overlooked because of the number of people here who work for companies where scaling is the primary concern. I think this is what he meant by people outside of VC-backed startups. I know of multiple companies that have had outrageous cloud-hosting bills and have had to hire fancy consultants to fix it.

I simply meant that Crystal lang features ultra high performance, and yet shares much of Rubys syntactical elegance. Much is built into the standard library and I have to ask what your experience with Crystal has been like so far? I find pretty much everything I need, and the easy FFI with C takes care of most of the rest (see the Mongo.cr wrapper for the C mongo driver, for example...)

I agree with that assessment. My experience has been reading a good bit into it. I considered learning it a few months ago, but wanted to focus on things that people were currently hiring for. Maybe at some point I will learn more, but I am a bit too broke right now to spend that much time on something that doesn't pay. I don't say that to be disparaging, it goes back to my point about it being immature and not having many engineers or companies using it.

despite it's pre 1.0 status it's arguably more production ready than php ever was/will-be etc.

I bet you rely on things written in PHP way more than you realize.

Exactly. See: Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, etc. People talk crap about PHP but it is a workhorse of the web.

indeed. this is largely legacy, but good luck changing that. I can't say that i miss it much, but then I don't work for either of these 2 entities. I'm familiar with what you are speaking about, so I don't think the lack of respect stems from a general ignorance of what you are referring to. It's rather people who have interacted with PHP in the past and didn't enjoy the experience.

That's a fair point.

I'm familiar with the usage stats on wordpress, lol. I can't say that this is a good thing, but if it suits your needs, have at it.

I see no reason to start any greenfield project in 2019 in PHP unless you literally only know or ever want to learn PHP. I could be wrong in terms of the entire language and it's ecosystem could have changed in the 18-20 years since I deliberated interacted with it last... We have a lot of things since mod php, so there's many other options, most of which don't involve PHP, so I suppose true fans will build their web apps in forth, I dunno...

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