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I’d still go Ruby. A language’s ecosystem and community are as much factors in why someone should choose or avoid it as its syntax. Both of those things are fan

I’d still go Ruby. A language’s ecosystem and community are as much factors in why someone should choose or avoid it as its syntax. Both of those things are fantastic for Ruby — I’d argue that they’re some of its best features, in fact. Crystal? Not so much.

jtms 7y ago
I’m a long time veteran of Ruby and someone who deployed production Rails apps in EARLY v1. I absolutely love and adore it and it’s by far my favorite language to work with. That being said, when I can write in a very stunningly similar language and get 10 to 100x performance with very little extra effort I am going to strongly consider it when deciding on my stack. Also the ecosystem for crystal is not terrible at all. I think it’s a great project and shouldn’t be ignored because “the ecosystem”
- sickcodebruh 7y ago
  I also think Crystal is a great project that shouldn’t be ignored because of its smaller ecosystem. The performance boost is nothing to sneeze at and I wasn’t suggesting that Crystal’s ecosystem is terrible, but it’s nowhere near Ruby’s. EVERY problem has been solved in Ruby. (Edit: Every problem that isn’t hamstrung by Ruby’s technical limitations. It’s certainly not the right tool for every job.) There’s a gem or a blog post or a service for everything and it will probably work very well. The language is stable and predictable. It won’t be as fast as we might want it to be but it’ll probably work with minimal effort out of the box. You’ll be able to put it into production with little to no fuss and it’ll just work. If it doesn’t just work, you’ll have no problem finding resources to get it resolved. I don’t think you can say any of that about Crystal. Maybe that stuff doesn’t matter for every individual or every project but for me, they’re significant enough that I think they should come up whenever anyone tries to compare the two.
  - petepete 7y ago
    I'd agree with this. It comes down to the project and scope. For tasks where correctness is paramount it's hard to argue against Crystal, but for most apps, most of the time, Ruby and Rails are sufficient.

jtms 7y ago

I’m a long time veteran of Ruby and someone who deployed production Rails apps in EARLY v1. I absolutely love and adore it and it’s by far my favorite language to work with. That being said, when I can write in a very stunningly similar language and get 10 to 100x performance with very little extra effort I am going to strongly consider it when deciding on my stack. Also the ecosystem for crystal is not terrible at all. I think it’s a great project and shouldn’t be ignored because “the ecosystem”

sickcodebruh 7y ago
I also think Crystal is a great project that shouldn’t be ignored because of its smaller ecosystem. The performance boost is nothing to sneeze at and I wasn’t suggesting that Crystal’s ecosystem is terrible, but it’s nowhere near Ruby’s. EVERY problem has been solved in Ruby. (Edit: Every problem that isn’t hamstrung by Ruby’s technical limitations. It’s certainly not the right tool for every job.) There’s a gem or a blog post or a service for everything and it will probably work very well. The language is stable and predictable. It won’t be as fast as we might want it to be but it’ll probably work with minimal effort out of the box. You’ll be able to put it into production with little to no fuss and it’ll just work. If it doesn’t just work, you’ll have no problem finding resources to get it resolved. I don’t think you can say any of that about Crystal. Maybe that stuff doesn’t matter for every individual or every project but for me, they’re significant enough that I think they should come up whenever anyone tries to compare the two.
- petepete 7y ago
  I'd agree with this. It comes down to the project and scope. For tasks where correctness is paramount it's hard to argue against Crystal, but for most apps, most of the time, Ruby and Rails are sufficient.