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Sweet! I have no interest in Kubernetes, but this lead me to give Crystal a try. Feels solid so far, nice standard lib for the usual things (json, http etc.). Compiler warnings helped find errors quickly. The language documentation reads very easily. And best of all: standalone executables.

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I used it a lot over the summer on some pet projects and really enjoyed it. Being a heavy Ruby/Typescript user in recent years it feels like a natural melding of the two. Macros are a really interesting way to achieve many of the same metaprogramming properties of Ruby (although a little awkward to reason about).

I used Jamis Buck's book The Ray Tracer Challenge[1] as a fun kind of way to learn the language and ended up learning a good chunk of the language as a result.

My biggest complaint is just that it's not more popular - it's ecosystem is pretty web developer-centric and I'd personally love to see it used for more things outside of that.

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challeng...

That page doesn't mention Crystal. Is the book about Crystal code?

No, it’s about building a ray tracer. You can use any language you want to work through the book. I find it a good way to explore new languages.

The standalone executables were the primary reason why I looked to rewrite the tool in something other than Ruby. I actually tried to use a sort of "compiler" for Ruby but the executables were huge, took long to build and had issues.

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