Crystal has compile-time metaprogramming, which is it's own thing and has many sensible uses... but yes it's not the metaprogramming people are used to in Ruby and that the entire Ruby ecosystem is pretty fundamentally built on.

Crystal has macros which is the metaprogramming for static/compiled languages. And last time I checked, there are way more things that you can do with Crystal macros than Rust's macros. And crystal's macros feel very familiar to the language itself, are easy to understand and use them whereas Rust's macros..

It's true the runtime meta programming is missing. Other comments mentioned some compile time options. But in my experience most Ruby doesn't really use metaprogramming for really hard cases. I've translated some larger modules to crystal recently and while there are magic things like activerecord out there, most metaprogramming is... simple. Often a glorified "I'd rather write a loop than repeat 3 similar method implementations". Outside of generic framework code I never ran into something meta which can't be trivially expanded to slightly repeating (and more readable) code.

Which is fine since the language is not really aimed at replacing Ruby (despite this blog post's headline)