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The Crystal programming language is very nice. It is a typed, compiled language with excellent performance. The syntax is inspired by Ruby but is not identical

The Crystal programming language is very nice. It is a typed, compiled language with excellent performance. The syntax is inspired by Ruby but is not identical to Ruby (by design). The all-important version 1.0 milestone was reached in March 2021. The next version (1.3) is scheduled for release in January 2022. Some downsides to Crystal: - No Windows version: Estimate for a Windows version is still not known - this will obviously turn away Windows developers. Crystal can be run via WSL (Windows Sub-system for Linux), but it's not ideal. - Slow(ish) compilation. - Small community: This isn't necessarily a problem, but as a new language you won't find the same learning resources and online discussions as more popular languages. However, the standard library is quite well fleshed out. https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/

phillipcarter 5y ago
Crystal was fun to learn for Advent of Code, especially as someone who has zero Ruby experience. Felt weird, but in a good way, and ticked off a lot of the boxes I like in languages (decent type inference, static types, good standard library, reasonable toolset, etc.)
sundarurfriend 5y ago
I was considering Crystal for Advent of Code. But when I checked it out, it seemed a lot of the shards (packages) had last commits in the "2-4 years ago" range. And one of the links in the official website's Community page (https://crystal-lang.org/community https://crystal-lang.org/community) lead to a domain squatter page (crystalshards.xyz), which raised questions of staleness. It seems to have since been fixed to https://crystalshards.org https://crystalshards.org, which does work, so I guess I just caught it in an unfortunate transitional period. I'll give Crystal a look again, thanks for the recommendation. (Also, I didn't know about downside 1 (no Windows version) - I guess that partly explains the small community.)

phillipcarter 5y ago

Crystal was fun to learn for Advent of Code, especially as someone who has zero Ruby experience. Felt weird, but in a good way, and ticked off a lot of the boxes I like in languages (decent type inference, static types, good standard library, reasonable toolset, etc.)

sundarurfriend 5y ago

I was considering Crystal for Advent of Code. But when I checked it out, it seemed a lot of the shards (packages) had last commits in the "2-4 years ago" range. And one of the links in the official website's Community page (https://crystal-lang.org/community https://crystal-lang.org/community) lead to a domain squatter page (crystalshards.xyz), which raised questions of staleness. It seems to have since been fixed to https://crystalshards.org https://crystalshards.org, which does work, so I guess I just caught it in an unfortunate transitional period. I'll give Crystal a look again, thanks for the recommendation. (Also, I didn't know about downside 1 (no Windows version) - I guess that partly explains the small community.)