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I also wished for a long time for Crystal to take off, but now having Go and Rust I don't see Crystal to gain too much relevance in the future, while it might b

I also wished for a long time for Crystal to take off, but now having Go and Rust I don't see Crystal to gain too much relevance in the future, while it might be appealing to Ruby devs, Ruby is becoming better every day, but still Ruby devs stay in Ruby because of the ecosystem, the company where I work on already decided that no new project will be written in C, C++, Ruby, Java and instead use Go or Rust, I suppose that other companies are doing the same.

pelasaco 3y ago
Exactly.. I was a Crystal enthusiast, but because of their slow development pace and small community, half-baked documentation (all understandable, no critics here) and the raise of Go (great documentation, fast pace development, huge community), was hard to keep focus on that. Go became my option to ruby, and I'm doing fine with that.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I can't suffer Go. C, Rust, C++, Ruby Python, Java, C#, VB.Net are all fine, F# looks cool too but I never used it. I started to use Crystal in a small commercial project, as a web backend, and it was very fun and promising. But the project got cancelled for completely unrelated reasons. I long for an excuse to use Crystal again. Hard typing combined with Ruby carefree style and EXEs without runtime... really cool stuff. I think Crystal will crack the Win32 nut eventually.
  - rookderby 3y ago
    I think windows is the main thing holding crystal back. I make little games for jams and I'm always trying out new languages. I submitted a bug related to running processes on windows last november, it was just recently closed as completed. Although I spend almost all of my at-home time on linux, I know that I have to provided windows executables for jams. I plan to come back to crystal when I can write once and can compile the same code everywhere.
pmontra 3y ago
I stay in Ruby because my customers want Rails and because my own scripts don't need to be fast. Edit and run is one step faster than edit, compile, run.
capableweb 3y ago
> , but now having Go and Rust If you go for Go or Rust you would never go for something like Crystal regardless, as they have different focuses. Just like Ruby, Crystal optimizes for code legibility and expressiveness, which both Go and Rust never really cared about, as it's about stability + performance (in the case of Golang) or safety + performance (in the case of Rust). Both of Go and Rust have horrible syntax compared to Ruby/Crystal, which is a fine tradeoff to make in cases.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Rust is pretty expressive. Horrible syntax... that's just a subjective measure. I wish programmers would get over it, because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things. But people are gonna be people, so it won't happen.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Yeah, I agree that it's highly subjective. And I don't mean that people shouldn't chose something just based on one variable, it obviously depends. No language is perfect for every use case. Personally I use Rust for a lot of things, even though I'm more productive in other languages, but sometimes it's just a really good fit for the problem. Pseudo-code, but this is how I see the difference in expressiveness and syntax: 3.times { println('Foobar') } for i in 0..3 { println!("Foobar") } Both of them makes sense though, so not a huge difference, but it's the same way in lots of ways in Rust in general. > because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things I know exactly what you're talking about, as most of the time I work in Clojure, and trying to show Clojure to other programmers who are used to C-like languages and never heard of any lisp-like language is a constant struggle, as their first reaction is always "eww, parenthesizes everywhere!" even though their favorite language usually has the same amount or even more.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Rust is spiky, like a crab.
vidarh 3y ago
As a Ruby dev, that Crystal is "close but different" means I know I won't be able to use my Ruby code but at the same time I get too little in return to make it feel worthwhile. For the very rare circumstances where Ruby is too slow for what I need to do, there's usually code in some other language I can wrap in an extension, and that code is far more likely to be C or some other more established language than Crystal.
- npn 3y ago
  To me Crystal is actually a more polished Ruby implementation. There was some annoying inconsistent in ruby stdlib that was corrected in Crystal, for example the modules for file/directory interaction. Ruby was my main language for scripting, but I switched to Crystal completely after getting comfortable with it. Now it is really hard to switch back to Ruby. Also, I thing compiled language is the greatest friend for older programmers. Over the time I'm getting more and more sloppy and very often make some typing error. Crystal being compiled language saved me countless time by refusing to compile when I made the mistake. Meanwhile in Ruby it can only be found after the script ran for a while, sometime it became a disaster because the action was destructive.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The thing is, any annoyance in the stdlib you can paper over with gems if you want, and still be able to keep using all the libraries out there. As for the type checking, Ruby is getting more and more opt in type checking, so that reason is slowly diminishing as well.

pelasaco 3y ago

Exactly.. I was a Crystal enthusiast, but because of their slow development pace and small community, half-baked documentation (all understandable, no critics here) and the raise of Go (great documentation, fast pace development, huge community), was hard to keep focus on that. Go became my option to ruby, and I'm doing fine with that.

actionfromafar 3y ago
I can't suffer Go. C, Rust, C++, Ruby Python, Java, C#, VB.Net are all fine, F# looks cool too but I never used it. I started to use Crystal in a small commercial project, as a web backend, and it was very fun and promising. But the project got cancelled for completely unrelated reasons. I long for an excuse to use Crystal again. Hard typing combined with Ruby carefree style and EXEs without runtime... really cool stuff. I think Crystal will crack the Win32 nut eventually.
- rookderby 3y ago
  I think windows is the main thing holding crystal back. I make little games for jams and I'm always trying out new languages. I submitted a bug related to running processes on windows last november, it was just recently closed as completed. Although I spend almost all of my at-home time on linux, I know that I have to provided windows executables for jams. I plan to come back to crystal when I can write once and can compile the same code everywhere.

pmontra 3y ago

I stay in Ruby because my customers want Rails and because my own scripts don't need to be fast. Edit and run is one step faster than edit, compile, run.

capableweb 3y ago

> , but now having Go and Rust If you go for Go or Rust you would never go for something like Crystal regardless, as they have different focuses. Just like Ruby, Crystal optimizes for code legibility and expressiveness, which both Go and Rust never really cared about, as it's about stability + performance (in the case of Golang) or safety + performance (in the case of Rust). Both of Go and Rust have horrible syntax compared to Ruby/Crystal, which is a fine tradeoff to make in cases.

bcrosby95 3y ago
Rust is pretty expressive. Horrible syntax... that's just a subjective measure. I wish programmers would get over it, because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things. But people are gonna be people, so it won't happen.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree that it's highly subjective. And I don't mean that people shouldn't chose something just based on one variable, it obviously depends. No language is perfect for every use case. Personally I use Rust for a lot of things, even though I'm more productive in other languages, but sometimes it's just a really good fit for the problem. Pseudo-code, but this is how I see the difference in expressiveness and syntax: 3.times { println('Foobar') } for i in 0..3 { println!("Foobar") } Both of them makes sense though, so not a huge difference, but it's the same way in lots of ways in Rust in general. > because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things I know exactly what you're talking about, as most of the time I work in Clojure, and trying to show Clojure to other programmers who are used to C-like languages and never heard of any lisp-like language is a constant struggle, as their first reaction is always "eww, parenthesizes everywhere!" even though their favorite language usually has the same amount or even more.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Rust is spiky, like a crab.

vidarh 3y ago

As a Ruby dev, that Crystal is "close but different" means I know I won't be able to use my Ruby code but at the same time I get too little in return to make it feel worthwhile. For the very rare circumstances where Ruby is too slow for what I need to do, there's usually code in some other language I can wrap in an extension, and that code is far more likely to be C or some other more established language than Crystal.

npn 3y ago
To me Crystal is actually a more polished Ruby implementation. There was some annoying inconsistent in ruby stdlib that was corrected in Crystal, for example the modules for file/directory interaction. Ruby was my main language for scripting, but I switched to Crystal completely after getting comfortable with it. Now it is really hard to switch back to Ruby. Also, I thing compiled language is the greatest friend for older programmers. Over the time I'm getting more and more sloppy and very often make some typing error. Crystal being compiled language saved me countless time by refusing to compile when I made the mistake. Meanwhile in Ruby it can only be found after the script ran for a while, sometime it became a disaster because the action was destructive.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The thing is, any annoyance in the stdlib you can paper over with gems if you want, and still be able to keep using all the libraries out there. As for the type checking, Ruby is getting more and more opt in type checking, so that reason is slowly diminishing as well.