The web frameworks look interesting too, but I haven't deep dived those just yet. You really get a Rubylike language with native performance which is very interesting.
One thing I wanted out of Nim is slightly more Python-likeness, I want regular OOP, since Crystal takes from Ruby (I believe it was originally written in Ruby, before it became self-hosting) it has sane OOP features I miss when I use Go, Rust or even Nim.
I really feel in a different timeline, Crystal could have been something, I also feel like "Ruby" for some leaves a bad taste, but Ruby is nowhere near as awful as most people think, even though it was never for me, it was still one of the nicest ecosystems I ever worked with long before Go got its package management situation situated.
Edit one more thought: I believe the Windows installer / Windows support for Crystal is a newer addition if I'm not mistaken, so it took a while before it got proper Windows support. Well, I just googled it, it started in 2023... but still, that's fairly recent by my book. I think any programming language should strive to work across the "big three" as soon as possible to increase adoption. Go took off the moment it came out for Windows and was formally released.
Why would you want that? Just to continue the habit? I'd say regular OOP is, after implicit `null`, the biggest mistake in software.
Crystal is nice, but for network programming, Go simply cannot be beaten by a language that has a equally limited type system.
I don't think anyone who regularly uses Ruby or Python thinks OOP is a mistake, it's in how you use it and whether one likes the OOP design of the language.
Then I remembered I could open [coding agent of choice] and it'd nearly oneshot whatever I would want to try in Crystal. I got a little disheartened.
Some languages for me were never meant to be 'used in production', but were a creative & learning space instead.
So it was a gamble learning something new could just result in a brick wall dead end where you can't fix the thing, you can't get in touch with anyone who knows how (or has time), there's no docs to help you on the way, the code base is a mess and inscrutable, maybe written the a language you don't know -- maybe even the one you're trying to learn! It could be very frustrating at times, to the point I'd just pass over some interesting languages if they weren't polished enough. Which is a shame because I know there's good ideas in there, I just can't invest the time to make sense of them. Seems contradictory, but designers are not always the best communicators.
With LLMs, all this consternation is gone. Can it write the program for you? I guess... but also not really because for many niche languages with interesting features, the LLM won't do so idiomatically, opting instead to implement enough functionality to scaffold a Python-shaped solution, and then it writes that.
The neat ideas are still there, the learning opportunity is still there, the ability to leverage technology in a way the LLM can't is still there. Especially in a creative and learning space!
Everyone who disagrees is just in pure denial or has never properly used an LLM to interact with regarding a code base.
A lot of agentic use creates a feeling of psuedo productivity.
Ive only met two devs who genuinely have supercharged their output with them, but they were also superstars before CC.
The agentic only folks are twiddling their thumbs all day messing with their 20 different meta-agentic tools, thinking that extra thing is finally going to give them those superpowers too.
I think being a "super contributor" has little to do with just having access to llms, but people will downvote this.
I'm not up to date, but the scheduling engine was far behind Go in terms of parallelism. Crystal was always quite good at concurrency.
But Go is popular because it's so good at parallelism (and relatively safe with a garbage collector).
I know Crystal has been working on this for the last few releases, but I'd be surprised if it's matching Go on parallelism.
Go's runtime is quite the engineering feat.
It can often outperform hand-optimized Rust in worst-case parallel workloads (p99), despite Rust having a number of pretty huge advantages...
Happy International Caps Lock Day!!1
I will say this comes with the asterisk that it heavily depends on what your concurrent system/problems looks like!
...but more often than not when dealing with web problems and network IO, the shape of concurrency/parallelism I need looks exactly like Goroutines, and even as someone who uses Rust/tokio daily: the Go runtime is an incredibly engineered system that usually beats Rust in my experience for application dev tasks.
Anyways, I love Crystal's syntax around concurrency! I wish we lived in a world where it had tons of Google engineers optimizing the runtime :)
Mainly because normal Ruby is an awesome language to write code, and it is also a language that's tried and lost the spotlight because its performance is really, really low, even when compared only with other interpreted languages.
Which means you can have fun trying new languages with every new project :)
If you ask Claude create me a Crystal controller for Kubernetes, good luck with that.
It's a great language for CLIs though. I'm glad to see the team still pressing on.
It isn't interoperable with Ruby and I don't know of any reputable companies using Crystal.
It just looks like Ruby, but it isn't Ruby and it is a compiled language? OK?
I am not sure why I should learn this language?
Kagi uses Crystal for their search backend [1]. How they feel about that today and whether that was the right call are, of course, separate questions.
[1] Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421149
Did you forget that until five minutes ago humans used to read the code? And they needed to understand it? Yes, there was an actual desire for great Ruby-like syntax without the implications of using it, like its performance characteristics and the need for an interpreter.
Yes, it didn't go mainstream. Should we all abandon every project we've ever worked on because they're not "relevant"?
My message to the HN community: HN is literally bankrolled by YC. If Crystal doesn't deserve to exist because other languages exist, why exactly should I care about your bullshit uber-for-dogs startup, or whatever not particularly original AI crap you think you're changing the world with these days? Get real. If you want people to be open to your ideas, maybe you ought to make an effort to be open to the ideas of others, and cultivate a climate where discussing different ideas is possible. Don't treat every HN post as an opportunity to opine on how you think the work of other people is flawed.
LLMs though - I confess they've changed the calculus. Now I no longer have to look at the language, and obey its stupid ideas about error handling, I just use golang for its better library support. But I still have a soft spot for Crystal!
In my opinion, it doesn’t excel at anything beyond being pleasant to read. Maybe if Go hadn’t come along, it would have gained more traction and developed a better concurrency runtime. Very few companies are publicly using it.
Plus, since 00s Ruby = Ruby on Rails, so it didn't appeal to ruby (on rails) developers back then.
Like every one else I also used ruby for almost everything back then, usually some hundred of lines or less for processing stuff. but for tasks that run for several hours using ruby was a frustrating experience. slowness and memory consumption aside, the duck typing system and lazy evaluation of method meaning you can run to typo after hours of running session. sure, you can fix it by write the code more carefully, running smoke tests beforehand and other stuff, but it still a chore, and when you write code all days it makes you sloppier.
having a strong typed compiled language helps it immensely, and with crystal you don't have to sacrifice the easiness of programming. and you can compile it to a portable binary and run it everywhere, no need to reinstall a huge toolchain again. (yeah rust or go can also do that, but not for ruby level expressioness language)
I'm sure crystal is not the ideal language for everything you want to use, and ruby is still helpful for what you use daily. but for some tasks, crystal surely has it own advantages. you can write very capable CLI programs without have to install a single library!
But my main point was that people who do want a fast Ruby should be aware that Crystal isn't a Ruby in any meaningful sense - if you like Crystal for Crystal, by all means use it.
also, using crystal you have parallel and concurrency to speed up your task. sure it is not as good as other matured languages, but it still does the job.
when doing with large amount of data, and with IO involved, you will see that your JIT or AOT engine for ruby still can not cut it, because in ruby there is so many layers of safety check and failure guard it is really hard to make it faster (number calculation is not everything). with crystal you can manipulate the io stream directly, avoiding a lot of intermediate steps. you can check yourself, they make a full page for it: https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.22/guides/performance.h...
personally I do not use a single language, I just pick the most suitable language for the job I'm doing, let it be ruby, python, crystal, rust, go or typescript. but surprisingly crystal is the one I use the most everyday.
Could also use Matz's Spinel Ruby compiler. That's Ruby with static types using RBS but you have to give up some metaprogramming to get it.
I love the idea that we could get ractors written with Spinel and compiled ahead of time. I also love the idea that I can use Ruby for self contained binary tools.
(And for the sake of avoiding confusion, Crystal is also a great project. I'm really pleased to see them continue making progress).
https://youtu.be/XVaRRryB_cQ?si=CuXiMDdwccH6wOra&t=760
Basically he's saying static typing is needed for AI today because it's "junior level", but for senior level programmers they are more experienced so these types blend into the background; therefore when AI is a senior level in the future, it will also not require static typing to not make mistakes. That writing correct code will be as natural to the LLM as moving your arm is to you.
Shouldn't be terribly hard to make it good though. Some time ago, I added a JIT REPL in a few afternoons with Claude, ending up with roughly the same performance as their compiler, and with it working reliably with all the libraries I tested. But since they don't want LLM contributions in Crystal, I just left it as an interesting experiment and started working on my own language instead.