Crystal 0.29 | Hacker News Reader

Crystal 0.29

crystal-lang.org

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I always click through to these announcements on HN, hoping to hear people talk about real projects (professional, hobby, or whatever) they are doing with this interesting language.

Please share if you have any!

Back in ancient times, I used Ruby to make web apps and tools, but eventually realized that when it's my choice to make, I'm just not smart enough to choose a programming language that doesn't give me powerful robot helpers like a strong type system (with inference please!), as-you-type static analysis, and the polished tooling and autocomplete functionality that derives from those.

So these days, I work mostly in Swift and TypeScript. But neither of them has the pretty, poetic concision that I thought good Ruby code had. (Although Swift comes a lot closer than TypeScript, which is constrained by its (nonetheless great) decision to be a superset of JavaScript).

So I still miss Ruby sometimes, because of that lack.

Crystal looks like it meets my above requirements for the standard squad of tireless cybernetic servants working alongside me to help me write better code, and also looks like it goes a long way toward letting people write beautiful code.

So who's actually using it, and for what?

There are multiple companies using it in production: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-in-product... other then that it is used across multiple projects in github, for anything from webapps, machine-learning, cyber-security, and data analysis

I'm writing a language in it called Mint, which compiles to JavaScript.

https://www.mint-lang.com/

I must have been living under a rock for the past five years, because Crystal went completely unnoticed until last week. As a long time Ruby programmer, I'm eager to give it a try.

I love Crystal. I'm really enjoying the type system and the the introduction of tuples and named tuples (instead of just using arrays and hashes everywhere). It makes it so much easier to reason about your code and catch common bugs.

Crystal is definitely the next language I want try for some use cases

I'm SO looking forward to the future of Crystal.

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