| BLUF: I love crystal and can't wait for it to get the attention I think it deserves. To give a bit of history of myself and programming languages, I first started as an EE/CS major working with ASM/C/C++/Matlab for EE and C++/Java/Lisp for CS. Up until graduation, it was just a given that programming languages were just a concession given to you so you didn't have to write assembly. OO in the form of C++/Java was the "better alternative" to imperative C. Lucky me. Then I heard about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. After reading "The Ruby Programming Language" and working through the examples, I was blown away by the idea that a language could be for a programmer and be a way to express ideas rather than something we translate ideas into. Metaprogramming and mixins and Procs oh my. Then I started working through Project Euler questions with Ruby and it all came crashing down with the reality of Ruby's runtime. Ruby gave me expressiveness but just could't give me the speed of my equivalent C/Java code. Granted, I was definitely doing very sub-optimal algos but even then, C/Java just didn't care and gave the answer in seconds, not minutes. Since then, Java & JS have paid my bills. I've seen the popularity of Ruby die as Rails fell out of style when Twitter moved away. I've messed around with Crystal, trying to work through the problems in "The Go Programming Language" in Crystal and finding that Crystal is a beautiful language and fast as hell. That said, there's always a trade-off right? Crystal's trade off is in compile time, especially with --release. However, I think that's a reasonable trade-off since your release builds should be on a beefy server and it could save you $$$ if it means your actual production servers can be lean as hell. That said, I'm also aware that this problem is exactly one that the Go language was meant to address (C++'s exponentially growing compile time). Crystal definitely needs: 1. IDE/Debugger support, understandable for a new language, but the language should be "finished" and tooling needs critical attention 2. Libraries. The classic problem of any new language. 3. Major sponsorship (would greatly help with point 1 & 2) |