
This is not a new year’s resolution - thibaut_barrere
https://crystal-lang.org/2017/12/19/this-is-not-a-new-years-resolution.html
======
bovermyer
It feels like Crystal is coming up more frequently on HN and Reddit than it
did in the past couple years.

I'd be curious to see actual usage numbers as they've changed over time.

------
lukeholder
Really loving Crystal, although not using it for any commercial applications
(yet). It's really nice for building small command line apps. It has stolen my
heart from Go TBH.

~~~
dilap
as someone who loves Go, you've piqued my interest. tell us more?

~~~
lukeholder
Nicer syntax (Subjective).

Suuuuper fast! (Not that it matters but likely faster than Go[0]).

Single binary builds/deployments (Just like Go).

[0] [http://blog.seraum.com/crystal-lang-vs-nodejs-vs-golang-
vs-h...](http://blog.seraum.com/crystal-lang-vs-nodejs-vs-golang-vs-http-
benchmark)

~~~
Thaxll
Isn't crystal single threaded only? How do you make that runs fast when you're
bound on a single thread or the underlying OS doesn't have async operations.
And in the benchmark you linked Go is as fast as crystal and it was go 1.5
which is quiet old.

~~~
hamandcheese
It’s single threaded (for now), but all IO is async under the hood and will
implicitly yield and allow a different fiber/green thread to run.

I might be one of the few people who would prefer Crystal remain single
threaded and that effort go elsewhere in the language.

------
_raul
I struggle to estimate any dev work beyond a few weeks, so I wonder if some of
these estimates may be wishful thinking too - maybe the Manas.Tech folks have
a good sense of the theory behind the work that’s left though, in which case
it’s only (“only”) a matter of implementing it. In any case, I wish them the
best and hope that they can release 1.0 next year!

~~~
RX14
At least for the concurrency work, there's been a lot of groundwork done for
it already, and even a working prototype - albeit with a much larger
scheduling overhead than we would like.

I suspect that it's a mix of both, these hours numbers are somewhat pulled out
of a hat but the concrete of what we actually want to do and how to go about
it is known so they won't be wildly off. The manas guys will know the details
though.

------
exabrial
I think Crystal is a brilliant language [non-intentional pun]. When I teach
programming, I have found that dynamic languages are a little harder to
explain. Been watching this for a number of years and I hope to see it
explode!

------
rodorgas
I notice they ask financial donations but not help with development. Since we
are developers and not investors, we are much more capable of donating our
time. What makes code contribution not useful (or irrelevant) in comparison to
money in Crystal? It would increase “hours invested above donations”, but it's
not a problem as their graph is trying to show.

~~~
RX14
We gladly welcome contributions, please feel free to donate your time! However
there are some tasks that are much easier to deliver and design as a small
team, instead of being able to be broken up into small parts where work can be
done by the community. We simply doubt someone is going to come along with the
time and drive to complete rewriting the whole fiber scheduler and concurrency
part of the stdlib as an external contribution.

That being said, Windows support is likely to be largely done by the community
and core team in tandem, as individual modules can be ported one-by-one.
There's also the overhead of managing all these open-source contributions
which takes time.

------
deedubaya
If nothing else, it's absolutely wonderful to see the Crystal team (RX14)
acting on community feedback. Kudos!

~~~
RX14
I didn't write this blog post, and it was actually mostly written before the
previous HN thread. It's not all me!

------
sdogruyol
Crystal production users: [https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-
in-product...](https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-in-
production)

------
maxpert
Please somebody write me a Ruby to Go transpiler :P

------
imtringued
Wishful thinking:

Could modern programming languages adopt isolated heaps with message passing
like Erlang does? This is the easiest solution to GC pauses and allows other
nice features like hot code reloading.

The majority of programming languages invented in the last 10 years don't seem
that different from each other. I'd love to see a programming language that
combines the strength of C++ and Erlang for soft realtime workloads.

~~~
anthonybullard
If you are looking for a modern language with a pragmatic syntax and uses
lightweight processes and message passing why not Elixir? It's an expressive,
productive language that can leverage The power and scope of the Erlang/OTP
ecosystem.

[https://www.elixir-lang.com](https://www.elixir-lang.com)

~~~
acangiano
Elixir is great but it most definitely doesn't fit the "C++ strengths" part of
the requirements. Contrary to popular belief, Elixir is a slow language. Think
Python/Ruby slow for compute-intensive tasks.

~~~
ch4s3
It's slow compared to C++, but for most tasks its ~5x faster than python or
Ruby. If the task is parallelizable, it will be quite a bit faster. But yeah,
you aren't going to be doing math with Elixir. One of the things you'll get
with Elixir/BEAM languages is really low and stable latency. You'll never get
that with long running Python or Ruby processes.

------
genzoman
Is there such a thing as vapor languages? I feel like crystal and elixir are
vapor languages.

~~~
chrisseaton
If you are wondering why people seem a bit offended by your comment, it's
because calling something vapourware has an implication almost of dishonesty
or a con.

Crystal is real software that you can use today and build yourself and modify.
It's doesn't make sense to accuse it of being vapourware.

~~~
aisofteng
I've always taken "vaporware" to refer to abandoned software.

~~~
grzm
This makes sense if you mean abandoned before release.

> _" In the computer industry, vaporware (Brit. vapourware) is a product,
> typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general
> public but is never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware)

Ha! It's even made it into Merriam-Webster's!

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporware](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/vaporware)

> _" a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not
> and may never become available"_

