[etaweb]

I worked with Elixir/Phoenix for over 3 years, and I recently started to learn Crystal, mostly to create CLI apps or other programs where I want to create a simple executable binary. I wanted a more expressive language than Go, and easier than Rust.

Out of curiosity, I took a quick look at some of the web frameworks available, they are interesting. Lucky's Components looks pretty good, but I still prefer Phoenix's Components because the syntax make it very close to raw HTML. Compilation is not incremental and is single threaded which means I have to wait at least 5 seconds every time I make a change (this was on a minimal project). It's not that bad, but compared to Elixir/Phoenix where it's almost instantaneous, it makes a difference.

Still, Crystal is an awesome language, and if for one reason Elixir was not a choice for a web project, I would definitely consider a Crystal framework.