All that means is that it's not (yet) going to be a mass-market language. That's fine, not everything needs to be. Ruby wasn't mass-market until, like you sai

All that means is that it's not (yet) going to be a mass-market language. That's fine, not everything needs to be. Ruby wasn't mass-market until, like you said, it got a killer application. All Crystal needs to do is prove itself useful to people long enough for a killer application to emerge, and the rest sorts itself out. You're strongly overplaying the importance of having an IDE; neither node.js nor Ruby had a strong contender there when they became popular, and I'd argue Python didn't either - at least not one successful enough that you could point to it as unblocking a popularity bottleneck. Integrations: it's got an FFI system and a dependency management system (in Shards); again, those will sort themselves out if they haven't already. Not everyone has to go through the hassle of wrapping a C library, it's enough for one person to do it and publish their work. Although for some reason our corporate network seems to blanket-block the TLD, so I can't check out how good the crystalshards.xyz selection actually is. The reasons why some things become popular and others don't are complicated and usually not what people think, and the route one language took to popularity isn't necessarily the only one. But then again, mass-market popularity isn't the only worthwhile goal.