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Ruby was one of the languages I "cut my teeth" with to some extent, and I've always loved it's syntax and guiding philosophies, but was pulled away to PHP for m

Ruby was one of the languages I "cut my teeth" with to some extent, and I've always loved it's syntax and guiding philosophies, but was pulled away to PHP for my job, and ended up using other things for side projects. So a project that compiles to native code but uses Ruby-like syntax is very much "what I would build if I committed to building a language". But I've kept pushing off learning it on the notion that I could always justify learning other things that were "version 1" and "production ready (whatever that means)". I'm thinking now is the time to jump in and try this out finally. Any real world users care to explain some domains that either are or are not well suited for this at the moment? Any "gotchas" with writing C-bindings, should I need to? Or is the library ecosystem fairly strong?

rienko 6y ago
It's very good for CLI apps, and quick one programs, web dev is decent Lucky is an awesome framework, the compile times make the code-compile-reload cycle subpar, specially if you compare it to scripting languages. Performance is normally excellent but the GC is suboptimal for some workflows, it's not yet written in crystal and it's too conservative recouping memory. The nicest side effect of crystal is that it's programs are far more likely to work on first compiles than ruby scripts, and the type system makes refactoring a large code base much safer.
waylandsmithers 6y ago
Personally I was surprised to see that Thoughtbot (a top web/mobile app consultancy and creator of factorybot and other well known open source libs) starting publishing blog posts detailing use of Crystal for some of its client projects. To me this was a sign that it should be taken seriously as an option for web development.