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The language itself is very interesting. I've dabbled a few times and really like the clean ruby-esque syntax. What puts me off delving further is the lack of

The language itself is very interesting. I've dabbled a few times and really like the clean ruby-esque syntax. What puts me off delving further is the lack of support in various editors / IDEs / Treesitter etc. I think the core development team should really devote some resources to this, as I'm sure I'm not the only one deterred by this dearth of tooling.

speps 5y ago
Lack of support for native Windows[1] is probably not helping adoption as well. [1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430 https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430
pankajdoharey 5y ago
My personal experience has been pleasant, and i think it is a bit faster than go. Also the easy syntax and better object Oriented features is a plus.
sidkshatriya 5y ago
I like the language but I haven’t tried it out yet. I’ve heard that the compile times can be very long. Is that improved or are there workarounds?
- npn 5y ago
  There will be an interpreter, so at least the feedback loop when developing will be fast enough. Time to compile an optimized binary will be still slow for the foreseeable future.
  - felipeccastro 5y ago
    That's great news! Is the interpreter being developed already? Anywhere we can follow the progress?
    - npn 5y ago
      It's kinda working right now, with some missing features like exceptions raising and catching, block closures, c-library binding (only libc works IIRC). You can follow the activity here: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910 https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910 I was pleasantly surprised myself that the interpreter actually already somewhat worked, as you can see in the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=een_W1YEICw&list=PLe1-A91ZPTpD5QZf4pQw4hpy8j7FTY8KR&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=een_W1YEICw&list=PLe1-A91ZPT... The creator also claimed that the interpreter only need a few more months to finish.
frollo 5y ago
Honestly, until they provide some more support at least in the editors and IDEs field and support native Windows Crystal is not going to be more than a fun tool. I like it, because the general developer experience I had was really pleasant, but I cannot really use it for work.
speg 5y ago
I’ve been playing with Crystal a lot (every night) for the last few months. It’s really fun language, and I don’t have even have any Ruby background! The main pain points from where I’m sitting are things like debugging and incremental compiling. You can throw lack of tooling in there too I suppose. The dev team knows and is working on these, but they are a small community based team so don’t expect they same resources as in Go or Swift. FWIW I’ve been having good experiences with Sublime.
- rishav_sharan 5y ago
  I am also having a better experience with sublime than with vs code.
- Normille 5y ago
  As per my original post, while the lack of tooling is my biggest pain point around the language ecosystem, inside the language itself, my main gripe is with the error messages. I find them quite impenetrable a lot of the time. Which is not ideal when confronting a new language. Crystal could take a leaf out of V or Rust's book here. Whatever you think of the languages themselves, the error messages are top notch. Errors that say "Ah. I see what you were trying to do here. Maybe you should try this instead?" are so much more helpful than "Why on earth did you do that?!"
kimburgess 5y ago
There's a few LSP implementation that are very usable: https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/scry https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/scry, https://github.com/elbywan/crystalline https://github.com/elbywan/crystalline Beginning of a tree-sitter parser here too: https://github.com/keidax/tree-sitter-crystal https://github.com/keidax/tree-sitter-crystal
ricardobeat 5y ago
Which IDE/editor do you use? I've had good experiences with Sublime and VS Code.

speps 5y ago

Lack of support for native Windows[1] is probably not helping adoption as well. [1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430 https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430

pankajdoharey 5y ago

My personal experience has been pleasant, and i think it is a bit faster than go. Also the easy syntax and better object Oriented features is a plus.

sidkshatriya 5y ago

I like the language but I haven’t tried it out yet. I’ve heard that the compile times can be very long. Is that improved or are there workarounds?

npn 5y ago
There will be an interpreter, so at least the feedback loop when developing will be fast enough. Time to compile an optimized binary will be still slow for the foreseeable future.
- felipeccastro 5y ago
  That's great news! Is the interpreter being developed already? Anywhere we can follow the progress?
  - npn 5y ago
    It's kinda working right now, with some missing features like exceptions raising and catching, block closures, c-library binding (only libc works IIRC). You can follow the activity here: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910 https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/10910 I was pleasantly surprised myself that the interpreter actually already somewhat worked, as you can see in the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=een_W1YEICw&list=PLe1-A91ZPTpD5QZf4pQw4hpy8j7FTY8KR&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=een_W1YEICw&list=PLe1-A91ZPT... The creator also claimed that the interpreter only need a few more months to finish.

frollo 5y ago

Honestly, until they provide some more support at least in the editors and IDEs field and support native Windows Crystal is not going to be more than a fun tool. I like it, because the general developer experience I had was really pleasant, but I cannot really use it for work.

speg 5y ago

I’ve been playing with Crystal a lot (every night) for the last few months. It’s really fun language, and I don’t have even have any Ruby background! The main pain points from where I’m sitting are things like debugging and incremental compiling. You can throw lack of tooling in there too I suppose. The dev team knows and is working on these, but they are a small community based team so don’t expect they same resources as in Go or Swift. FWIW I’ve been having good experiences with Sublime.

rishav_sharan 5y ago
I am also having a better experience with sublime than with vs code.
Normille 5y ago
As per my original post, while the lack of tooling is my biggest pain point around the language ecosystem, inside the language itself, my main gripe is with the error messages. I find them quite impenetrable a lot of the time. Which is not ideal when confronting a new language. Crystal could take a leaf out of V or Rust's book here. Whatever you think of the languages themselves, the error messages are top notch. Errors that say "Ah. I see what you were trying to do here. Maybe you should try this instead?" are so much more helpful than "Why on earth did you do that?!"

kimburgess 5y ago

There's a few LSP implementation that are very usable: https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/scry https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/scry, https://github.com/elbywan/crystalline https://github.com/elbywan/crystalline Beginning of a tree-sitter parser here too: https://github.com/keidax/tree-sitter-crystal https://github.com/keidax/tree-sitter-crystal

ricardobeat 5y ago

Which IDE/editor do you use? I've had good experiences with Sublime and VS Code.