- In my small benchmarks, Crystal is very fast - In benchmarks not my own, Crystal is very fast - Crystal has a very nice batteries included stdlib.
Benchmarks that aren't mine: http://lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/fast-high-level-programming-...
The only other language that is high level in its ballpark is D.
If you manipulate strings day in day out in your workflow, the first thing you do is remove all those allocations and for what is left you use a memory pool.
The speedup could easily go into the 20x in any language. It's actually one of the area where Python or JS can beat statically typed languages, they focused a lot into optimizing strings while statically typed languages often leave that as an exercise to the reader.
I think this has more to do with writing the string handling functions in heavily-optimized C rather than in Python/JS than it does with memory tricks, but I'll happily accept correction.
I don't disagree that benchmarks should be taken with a mound of salt though.