Crystal 1.5 | Hacker News Reader

Crystal 1.5

crystal-lang.org

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> The interpreter is coming to shape! A whole bunch of interpreter bugs got fixed. While it won’t be released in the binaries distributions yet, we will work towards incorporating it in the major platforms right after this release. Stay tuned!

Very excited for this. One of the beautiful parts of working in Ruby or Python or a Lisp is the REPL experience, allowing for more iterative development without the possibility of the developer getting distracted during a recompile-and-wait cycle.

The ability of Crystal to provide an interpreted mode, in addition to its high-performance compiled static binary output for production, may just be the trick that opens Crystal to a wider audience of developers. Just think of how many intro tutorials to other languages start by showing someone interpreted mode usage!

100%; the interpreter is the main missing thing right now, otherwise crystal is my go-to today; I use crystal and ruby a lot, and even on an M1 Max it's still ~1-2s of waiting for a compile, vs ruby with near-instant feedback.

What sort of programs do you use crystal for?

A mix, but mostly web-app backends, or data processing when the quantities are large (aka annoying enough ruby is noticably slow; 100k json files, or millions of rows).

As noted on the first 1.5 release post: It is great to see that there is still progress. Coming from Ruby, Crystal really excites me as a complimentary language. Even though I am not in the target group, I believe that the progress on Windows support is an important step to further the language by widening the user base. I wish for crystal to become more widespread adopted after having done some experiments with the Lucky framework and a self-written PoC AWS Lambda runtime [1] (incredibly fast cold start and processing time, combined with strict event parsing).

[1] https://github.com/lagr/aws_lambda_runtime

It was released over 2 weeks ago. :) Looking forward to Windows support.

Is there a blog post/series that dives into programming with Crystal in general, comparing what you can and can't do relative to Ruby? Bonus if it explores paradigms and techniques that are difficult (or much more verbose) in other languages.

A near off-topic quibble (yes I realise I'm insane): the icosahedron is a poor icon choice for a language called Crystal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icosahedral_honeycomb

A rhombic dodecahedron would work better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_dodecahedral_honeycomb

Congratulations on 1.5. An interesting language that I personally enjoyed when toying around. I like the approach to "meta"-programming via macros.

Is it still single-threaded?

I think I read a few months ago this was the main milestone for crystal to be really competitive.

I would really like to have a ruby-like performant language.

AFAIK, it does have parallelism support, via `CRYSTAL_WORKERS` env variable, however, it's not production-ready, and it's not clear what's the priority for the team.

Probably it's good enough to run personals scripts, but widespread and/or production adoption is another level.

I considered adopting the language at my company, but no (production-ready) parallelism is a dealbreaker for me.

I have exactly the same thought. And yet, I wish...

Is this that compiled version of Ruby? I love ruby.

It looks and writes similarly; some simple/small things will work in both - the std lib is very similar. However, it's statically typed (though, mostly/partitally interfered; aka sometimes you don't need to specify), and complied. If you love ruby, you should def check it out as it's super fast, and the learning curve is imho low.

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