
Crystal 0.33 - Can_Not
https://crystal-lang.org/2020/02/14/crystal-0.33.0-released.html
======
kick
Crystal is really nice! Cloning Ruby syntax but making it prettier is probably
one of the smartest language design decisions that have happened in a long
time.

It's definitely gotten further on my radar in the past year or so, though I
remember reading this a few years ago and finding it pretty cool then, too:

[https://blog.codeship.com/an-introduction-to-crystal-fast-
as...](https://blog.codeship.com/an-introduction-to-crystal-fast-as-c-slick-
as-ruby/)

Relevant HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12223395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12223395)

Seeing Lilith in (what was, I think) December was what really alerted me to
the fact that it had come along so far, I had mostly thought it was dead
before.

Lilith: [https://github.com/ffwff/lilith](https://github.com/ffwff/lilith)

Relevant HN thread on Lilith:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713)

~~~
pjmlp
I just wish that they would had chosen another name for the OS.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_\(computer\))

[https://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/](https://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/)

~~~
scroot
The Oberon boon -- especially the 2013 update -- is something that is,
unfortunately, uncommon in the field: a total description of a computing
system, top to bottom.

If you or anyone reading this has access to that book in epub or similar
ereader format I'd greatly appreciate. It seems Wirth published only a PDF
(probably from MS Word)

~~~
pjmlp
The original books were written in the Oberon System Word Processor, and you
can access them as part of Oberon live documentation.

For example by running A2 and starting Oberon System 3 from it.

Regarding converting them into epub, I guess it is a question of copyright,
even if Wirth has made the PDF versions freely available, but I am no lawyer.

------
gregors
I recently noticed that frontend language Mint is written in Crystal -
[https://github.com/mint-lang/mint](https://github.com/mint-lang/mint)

I've been playing around with Crystal for some toy projects as well as some
data cleaning/munging scripts. I had a fairly large CSV dump that was making
Ruby choke to death - porting to Crystal was trivial and it ran amazingly
fast!

I'm super interested to see where the concurrency story goes in Crystal.
Fingers crossed!

------
devmunchies
I’ve been using Crystal since 2016, but have recently started to learn Rust.
Rust definitely makes me appreciate Crystal’s pretty robust std lib. it’s more
like Go in that sense.

~~~
bsaul
What's the state of crystal's concurrency ? I think i've read something on HN
saying it wasn't quite there yet..

~~~
devmunchies
You mean parallelism? Concurrency has been there for years. Parallelism was
available under a flag a few months ago. I do t know the current status since
I don’t need it.

~~~
bsaul
sorry yeah i mean parallelism. Is the model an event loop running on single
thread , like with with node.js ?

When you say you don't need it, don't you use crystal for developing backend
APIs ?

------
faitswulff
The most interesting Crystal project I've heard of is this x86-64 OS:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/crystal_programming/comments/djoy8a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/crystal_programming/comments/djoy8a/lilith_an_x8664_os_written_in_crystalc/)

If Crystal can make a case for itself as a systems programming language, I'm
very interested.

------
appleiigs
I wonder why Ruby users don’t flock to Crystal, and Python users to Julia.
With all the whining about performance and types, they just stay put.

~~~
luhego
I use Python and I just don't like 1-based indexed languages. I would say that
a better replacement for Python(at least for backend) is Go.

~~~
nine_k
Go removes so much of the expressive power that writing it after Python is a
bit of a pain.

OTOH I realize that many people don't use that expressive power and are happy
with copy-pasting stuff.

~~~
jitl
I’m waiting for generics to land before I return to Go.

------
xuejie
Crystal is indeed a very nice language, but the only thing that is holding me
from using it greatly, is that it still uses the Boehm GC, which makes it hard
to compete with other languages in a production setting.

I understand we might get there one day but I'm afraid this is taking far too
long.

~~~
anonsivalley652
Pony's ORCA GC is supposed to be the faster than Erlang's BEAM/HiPE and Azul
C4. Ideally, it would be extracted from that language and examples given how
to integrate it with the likes of LLVM (it's not compatible OOTB with LLVM's
API because of different synchronization primitives).

[https://www.ponylang.io/media/papers/orca_gc_and_type_system...](https://www.ponylang.io/media/papers/orca_gc_and_type_system_co-
design_for_actor_languages.pdf)

------
pjmlp
Love to see the progress on Crystal, hope that they manage to sustain its
development.

------
ampdepolymerase
Still no first class Win32 support.

