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Crystal 0.24.1 released

87 points by wulfklaue 9y ago

drallison 9y ago
Crystal is a programming language. https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ Crystal’s syntax is heavily inspired by Ruby’s, so it feels natural to read and easy to write, and has the added benefit of a lower learning curve for experienced Ruby devs.
samuell 9y ago
Crystal stacks up pretty nicely in our crowd-sourced feature table, for statically compiled languages: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BAiJR026ih1U8HoRw__nzbCSFnnHicWrjxpW5l6-O3w/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BAiJR026ih1U8HoRw__n... ... providing light-weight threads, and possibly going to support M:N coroutine:thread multiplexing(?). Let's hope.
nws 9y ago
I feel like Crystal has been alpha for 4 years.
- deedubaya 9y ago
  That may be, but it's really quite stable for pre-1.0. I have Crystal apps running in production without problems and great success. I'd say, in some scenarios, Crystal is more stable in alpha than some post-alpha language releases I've worked with in the past.
- bjz_ 9y ago
  It takes a long time to build a language. Rust was in development for many years, and it has had the benefit of backing by Mozilla.
ricardobeat 9y ago
Great to see progress, and exciting news on the possibility of swapping the GC. Thank you to all maintainers and contributors, here's to a big multi-threaded 2018! :)
skrebbel 9y ago
I really like initiatives like Crystal and Nim, in that they appeal to users of popular languages like Ruby and Python yet are much faster. But I fear that the problem they solve isn't big enough. For desktop/mobile apps, they need a UI framework so I suppose they're targeted at web or network/system programming mostly. However, "Faster Ruby" or "Faster Python" is, in practice, solved by faster hardware as well. At the same time, for web apps to truly scale you need more than just a constant factor increase in speed - you need to handle parallelism better. This is what Go and Erlang/Elixir do with green threads, or Rust with its borrow checker. This is why I've been surprised that a well thought out and polished initiative like Crystal doesn't do anything in this area, and makes me fear that its popularity might not last. Nim was all over HN a few years ago and now not seen that much anymore - Crystal is obviously different from Nim but they tackle many of the same problems in similar enough ways. I fear/hope that, because of this, languages like Pony[0] will stick around longer - it seems to combine the best ideas from Crystal, Erlang and Rust in an ergonomic way. [0] https://playground.ponylang.org/ https://playground.ponylang.org/
- girvo 9y ago
  To be fair, the Nim community agrees with your assessment. Quite a lot of development is going into the nimx library for that reason!
- jackmott 9y ago
  " solved by faster hardware as well. " Not really, for a few reasons. First, hardware is not getting much faster per core anymore, and in the case of python (maybe ruby too?) making efficient use of more cores is not easy. Secondly, CPU performance is largely limited by ram latency and throughput. The inability of high level, interpreted, safe language to carefully control memory access patterns means you run into the limitations of RAM more often, leaving your fast CPU idle much of the time.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >However, "Faster Ruby" or "Faster Python" is, in practice, solved by faster hardware as well. That ship has sailed years ago.
- 9y ago
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
So crystal and nim are the new Flavor Oft he Month ? Got it.
paulscoder 9y ago
I think Crystal follows the Ruby path too tightly. Ruby also never found its place in the UI framework world. The popularity of web apps during the rise of current rich interfaces and the boom of SaaS consumer products didn't give Ruby and reason for its contributor base to expand successfully. Times have changed again and we are back to being interested in standalone apps. I really like Crystal and hope some of the UI focused community from Rust will bleed over.

87 points by wulfklaue 9y ago

Crystal is a programming language. https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ Crystal’s syntax is heavily inspired by Ruby’s, so it feels natural to read and easy to write, and has the added benefit of a lower learning curve for experienced Ruby devs.

samuell 9y ago

Crystal stacks up pretty nicely in our crowd-sourced feature table, for statically compiled languages: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BAiJR026ih1U8HoRw__nzbCSFnnHicWrjxpW5l6-O3w/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BAiJR026ih1U8HoRw__n... ... providing light-weight threads, and possibly going to support M:N coroutine:thread multiplexing(?). Let's hope.

nws 9y ago

I feel like Crystal has been alpha for 4 years.

deedubaya 9y ago
That may be, but it's really quite stable for pre-1.0. I have Crystal apps running in production without problems and great success. I'd say, in some scenarios, Crystal is more stable in alpha than some post-alpha language releases I've worked with in the past.
bjz_ 9y ago
It takes a long time to build a language. Rust was in development for many years, and it has had the benefit of backing by Mozilla.

ricardobeat 9y ago

Great to see progress, and exciting news on the possibility of swapping the GC. Thank you to all maintainers and contributors, here's to a big multi-threaded 2018! :)

skrebbel 9y ago

I really like initiatives like Crystal and Nim, in that they appeal to users of popular languages like Ruby and Python yet are much faster. But I fear that the problem they solve isn't big enough. For desktop/mobile apps, they need a UI framework so I suppose they're targeted at web or network/system programming mostly. However, "Faster Ruby" or "Faster Python" is, in practice, solved by faster hardware as well. At the same time, for web apps to truly scale you need more than just a constant factor increase in speed - you need to handle parallelism better. This is what Go and Erlang/Elixir do with green threads, or Rust with its borrow checker. This is why I've been surprised that a well thought out and polished initiative like Crystal doesn't do anything in this area, and makes me fear that its popularity might not last. Nim was all over HN a few years ago and now not seen that much anymore - Crystal is obviously different from Nim but they tackle many of the same problems in similar enough ways. I fear/hope that, because of this, languages like Pony[0] will stick around longer - it seems to combine the best ideas from Crystal, Erlang and Rust in an ergonomic way. [0] https://playground.ponylang.org/ https://playground.ponylang.org/

girvo 9y ago
To be fair, the Nim community agrees with your assessment. Quite a lot of development is going into the nimx library for that reason!
jackmott 9y ago
" solved by faster hardware as well. " Not really, for a few reasons. First, hardware is not getting much faster per core anymore, and in the case of python (maybe ruby too?) making efficient use of more cores is not easy. Secondly, CPU performance is largely limited by ram latency and throughput. The inability of high level, interpreted, safe language to carefully control memory access patterns means you run into the limitations of RAM more often, leaving your fast CPU idle much of the time.
coldtea 9y ago
>However, "Faster Ruby" or "Faster Python" is, in practice, solved by faster hardware as well. That ship has sailed years ago.
9y ago

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

So crystal and nim are the new Flavor Oft he Month ? Got it.

paulscoder 9y ago

I think Crystal follows the Ruby path too tightly. Ruby also never found its place in the UI framework world. The popularity of web apps during the rise of current rich interfaces and the boom of SaaS consumer products didn't give Ruby and reason for its contributor base to expand successfully. Times have changed again and we are back to being interested in standalone apps. I really like Crystal and hope some of the UI focused community from Rust will bleed over.