[pizza234]

Crystal doesn't have built-in support for parallelism, let alone production-grade support. This is a significant lack for a modern language.

For a language that is around 8 years old, this may be a serious problem, since the surrounding ecosystem has been probably written without parallelism in mind, and it may take a very long time to be updated (if ever).

[npn]

> Crystal doesn't have built-in support for parallelism

They do, but it is hidden inside a compiler flag, if you compile your prject with `Dpreview_mt` then it will come with multi-threaded support. This has been an experimental feature for a few year though, and there is not much improvement since it first got introduced.

Personally I don't use crystal for this kind of feature, and it runs stable enough when I use it for some cpu intensive tasks when I rarely need it.

Crystal really shines when you need something that you usually write a python/ruby script to do, especially for tasks that run for hours. Converting some script from ruby to crystal and run it in production mode typically reduce the time consumed to 1/5 or even 1/10 of the original depends on the job. As someone who have to read gigabytes of text files regularly, Crystal is currently the best one for the task.

The compilation time for released binary is something need much improvement though. And I'm not sure if they can even achieve incremental compilation.

[pizza234]

> hey do, but it is hidden inside a compiler flag, if you compile your prject with `Dpreview_mt` then it will come with multi-threaded support

It depends on the domain. From a production perspective, an flag-gated functionality that has been experimental for two or more years, is not "built-in". Plus, as explained, the ecosystem (I think I've read even the stdlib) doesn't give guarantees about thread safety

For small-scall scripting, then sure, it could be useful - but anything will do. I've evaluated for use at my company, and discarded it, because of the lack of libraries. Sadly, this is a chicken-and-egg situation. I've also evaluated contributing to it, but I won't until multithreading is stable.

[npn]

> I've evaluated for use at my company

Well this might be the problem. In corporate environment you can't afford to be too adventurous.

Personally I solve the "lack of libraries" problem by using more than one language, then connect them via child process call or some persistent storage like database or plain text files.

But it's entirely a different matter when the code need to be used by a lot of people.

[sanxiyn]

I use PyPy for such cases. Is Crystal better than PyPy?

[npn]

I think Crystal is better than Python in term of language design. Unlike Ruby and Python that were way older, crystal is relatively new, so they learned from other languages mistake and try to improve it, result in a more cleaner language.

For the cases mentioned, I think crystal is immensely helpful: - Reading/writing files are easy, usually a single method will give you the result you want. - Working with directories are nice, things like `Dir.mkdir_p`, `Dir.each_child`, `File.exists?`... all existed to make your life easier. - Like ruby, you can invoke shell command easily using backticks - There are some useful libraries to for console app, like `colorize` or `option_parser`. Crystal is a battery included language, so the standard library is filled with useful libraries. - Working with lists and hashmaps is a breeze, since the Enumerable and Iterable modules are filled with useful methods, mostly inspired from ruby land. - Concurrent is built in, so you can trivially write performant IO-bounded tasks like web crawlers.

For a project that made by a handful of people, I just can't praise the dev team enough for making a language this practical.