What puts me off delving further is the lack of support in various editors / IDEs / Treesitter etc. I think the core development team should really devote some resources to this, as I'm sure I'm not the only one deterred by this dearth of tooling.
It’s really fun language, and I don’t have even have any Ruby background!
The main pain points from where I’m sitting are things like debugging and incremental compiling. You can throw lack of tooling in there too I suppose.
The dev team knows and is working on these, but they are a small community based team so don’t expect they same resources as in Go or Swift.
FWIW I’ve been having good experiences with Sublime.
Crystal could take a leaf out of V or Rust's book here. Whatever you think of the languages themselves, the error messages are top notch. Errors that say "Ah. I see what you were trying to do here. Maybe you should try this instead?" are so much more helpful than "Why on earth did you do that?!"
Beginning of a tree-sitter parser here too: https://github.com/keidax/tree-sitter-crystal
Time to compile an optimized binary will be still slow for the foreseeable future.
You can follow the activity here: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910
I was pleasantly surprised myself that the interpreter actually already somewhat worked, as you can see in the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=een_W1YEICw&list=PLe1-A91ZPT...
The creator also claimed that the interpreter only need a few more months to finish.