+1 to the other comments, but I feel like crystal has a few huge chicken and egg problems, maybe exacerbated by the fact its natural "audience" is perhaps the r

+1 to the other comments, but I feel like crystal has a few huge chicken and egg problems, maybe exacerbated by the fact its natural "audience" is perhaps the ruby community. As a rubyist myself I've tried to evaluate/subversively introduce crystal into projects a number of times and every time I had to bail out because i couldn't identify adequate libraries for things i needed. I don't need (or, frankly, want) Rails but I couldn't identify even basic things like an adequate ORM or anything other than the most basic wrappers around raw DB drivers. There's a few web frameworks that look kind of promising (amber, kemal) but I ran into immediate problems testing them out and they seems just way too immature. And it just continues - libraries i need just not existing, or being so basic I couldn't in good conscience rely on them in a professional context. This isn't crystal's fault, it's just not done yet. The problem is, right now at least, crystal's "sales pitch" is "ruby, but type safe and faster and more modern" - but that seems like a vague theoretical future benefit, whereas I have all the tools I need in ruby right now. It's gonna be a tough nut to crack. I do wish them the best though.