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Comment by renewedrebecca | Hacker News Reader

I wish Crystal had better IDE support, otherwise it’s just about perfect.

I wish we lived in a world where Crystal dominated over Go, but we're far from being there.

Admittedly, the slowness of the compiler (due to the nature of the language), and lack of better tooling are not helping, but 9 out of 10 times I enjoy way more writing Crystal than Go.

I think Crystal is going to need much more community support (articles, tutorials, blogs, community) and corporate sponsorship for it to even thrive in today's environment where we have an abundance of choices.

IIRC, I read somewhere, several months ago ago, that its type inference made it slow to compile anything but small programs?

Yes, I believe so because it uses global type inference. I would gladly add explicit types everywhere instead of this to use Crystal if it had decent tooling, because everything else about the language is really perfect.

> I would gladly add explicit types everywhere instead of this to use Crystal

Agreed. Good IDE support can easily add explicit types too.

Intriguing. You really didn't find any issues with it? Anything that you thought should / not be there, or some non-trivial bug?

The language and stdlib feel like a more polished Ruby, though I haven't explored it in deep. The tooling, last I checked, is what's behind - the interpreter didn't work for simple apps, and the LSP is slow and full of bugs.

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