Author of the article here. This implementation of A* was me playing around. It is definitely not optimized for either Ruby or Crystal It was merely a chunk of

Author of the article here. This implementation of A* was me playing around. It is definitely not optimized for either Ruby or Crystal It was merely a chunk of Ruby code that I had lying around. You are right about the unsorted queue being a hack around Array, but it was part of another experiment of using a "Fast Stack"[1] for the A* algorithm. It allowed me to swap in other Queue implementations easily. The point of the article was merely "How much work does it take to port Ruby to Crystal" The performance differences were just fun to see, not the intent. If I get time, maybe I'll run this through jRuby+Truffle as a comparison, that would be interesting to see. [1] https://github.com/SteveRabin/JPSPlusWithGoalBounding https://github.com/SteveRabin/JPSPlusWithGoalBounding