[Willamin]

Crystal is wonderful for one-off programs in my experience.

Elixir had a long startup time for one-off scripts in my experience, but Elixir’s syntax is still one of my favorites for scripting.

[dnautics]

Is a 100ms startup time really a big deal for something that is either going to be manually triggered or cronjobbed and expected to take on the order of minutes?

[Myrmornis]

Those sorts of startup times discourage writing command-line tools (e.g. composable text processing things one might join with pipes).

[cutler]

Ruby scripting has occupied the sysadmin space for over a decade yet on my 2013 Macbook Pro the latest Ruby 2.6.5 takes around 250ms to start. That's a mere 1/4 of a second. Sure, Python, Perl and PHP have shorter startup times but surely this is a non-problem?

[Myrmornis]

No, things like sort, grep, uniq, cut, wc, cat, awk, sed, tr, etc etc. You wouldn't want them to take 1/4 second to start up.

[emmelaich]

Crystal's startup time is not great though. 700ms vs 100ms for ruby.

Compared with

   time crystal eval <<<"puts 1"
   time ruby <<<"puts 1"

[bhaak]

You know that you are timing the compiler and not the compiled program here?

Rather try "echo 'puts 1' > puts.cr && crystal build puts.cr && time ./puts"

BTW, you can dramatically decrease the cold startup times of ruby if you call it with the options '--disable-gems --disable-rubyopt' if that's an option to you. For many scripts it certainly is.

But even on a 8 years old machine with spinning rust, after the ruby stuff is cached in the OS filesystem cache, my startup time are smaller than 10ms.