Crystal 1.6.0 Is Released | Hacker News Reader

Crystal 1.6.0 Is Released

crystal-lang.org

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I’ve followed Crystal with interest for years, and I’m surprised it has not gained more traction over time. It’s a cool ptoject!

The only project that I have came across that uses Crystal is Invidious.

Congratulations to the Crystal devs on another release! It's been great to see the compiler and standard library continue to mature.

I like the look of Crystal but lack of decent tooling and slow compile times put me off.

I wrote a small web app in Crystal a few years ago. I enjoyed the language and the experience, except for the compile times. Any experiences of folks using the interpreter for speeding up iterative development?

Had the same problem, never really returned afterwards

What is the killer feature of Crystal?

Say, for Go it's utter simplicity and easy concurrency.

For Rust, it is the many safety guarantees on top of high performance.

For Python, it is the ease of learning and interactive fiddling on top of a colossal ecosystem.

Etc. What sets Crystal apart?

ruby-ish (yet more strongly typed) syntax that compiles to native code.

I'd think it would be system level programming with acceptably good performance with high level abstractions and the Ruby flavor. Similarly is Nelua[1] which uses Lua's syntax and APIs and compiles to C.

[1]: https://nelua.io

I'd say it's the Ruby-inspired syntax. Some people find the Ruby syntax a joy to work with. Crystal has that, but also includes type checking out of the box, among other things.

The front page does a good job of outlining the key features of Crystal:

https://crystal-lang.org/

If none of these features seem that compelling for you, then Crystal may not be for you. As someone who has experience writing/reading/maintaining Ruby code, Crystal seems a lot more friendly to me than Go, but each to their own.

I like the type safety, but for everything else, they compete directly with Elixir too. I feel like some unique feature might be needed.

But I hope to be wrong, syntax looks great.

I wouldn't say Elixir is really close to Ruby syntax. I see Elixir more like the "Scala of BEAM VM" (but that doesn't really do Elixir justice).

For Go, I want a better type system, better syntax, better exception handling.

For rust, I want simpler syntax and simpler memory safety.

For python, I want something much faster, an actually existing typesystem (not fancy linter comments pretending to be a typesystem), otherwise I'd be using Ruby.

W00t, keep up the great work!

Are there any large companies that use Crystal in production?

The Kagi search engine is written in crystal on the backend

See here https://crystal-lang.org/used_in_prod/

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