
Ruby on Rails to Lucky on Crystal: Blazing fast, fewer bugs, and even more fun - bradleybuda
https://hackernoon.com/ruby-on-rails-to-lucky-on-crystal-blazing-fast-fewer-bugs-and-even-more-fun-104010913fec
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paulcsmith
Author of Lucky here. The title may have been a bit misleading. Lucky is not
Ruby on Rails for Crystal. It has a different take on nearly everything in
Rails, but it aims to solve the same problems: make web development fun and
productive.

But it also adds: and make writing fast applications easy, and prevents bug
from making it to production.

If you use Lucky now, you will be missing the vast ecosystem that Ruby and
Rails provide, but I think that is a temporary problem. Lucky and Crystal are
growing quite quickly.

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meesterdude
Eh - Rails is good. Really good. And I don't think it is just _so_ flawed that
another framework has to come along and make things better. It's also fast,
has a great ecosystem, is one of the least buggy development environments,
enjoyable to work with...

That said, Crystal needs a rails-like framework. And who knows - maybe it will
come to replace rails as the most productive and enjoyable framework for web
development. But it'll take a while, a long while, to replicate the robustness
that rails has - and a lot of that has to come from a vibrant community.

But it's not changing any games - it's still just a web development framework,
for a language that's not even at 1.0.

~~~
paulcsmith
I agree. I've been using Rails for 12 years and it is my second favorite
framework :)

Lucky and Crystal are missing the ecosystem, which the article mentions, but
it also adds a lot that Rails is missing. Lucky is much much faster and the
speed is effortless. Rails _can_ be fast, but based on my experience so far,
you have to do some work to get reasonable speeds.

Lucky and Crystal have also caught a lot of bugs, which makes development much
more pleasurable, and happier customers.

Right now, it probably takes longer to use Lucky and Crystal. Like you said,
the ecosystem is lacking so you often have to write code that Ruby would have
a gem for, but in the long term, this will be solved. I'm very confident of
that.

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joshmn
"Ruby on Rails for ___" is getting really old. Here's why:

Nothing will compete with Ruby on Rails for the foreseeable future. That's not
to say these attempts are meaningless, but trying to compare something to
Ruby's ecosystem just isn't fair.

Ruby's ecosystem caught fire in thanks to Rails, and in thanks to how we were
writing web apps in the mid-late 2000s. Web frameworks were just starting to
really gain adoption by hobbyists. On top of that, people were sick of writing
PHP.

Remember the days of uploading a bunch of files to some server via FTP? When
shared hosting powered your forums for a little while? When 100gb bandwidth
was a ton? I do.

Any sort of meaningful alternative to those pains was attractive. People
flocked. And Ruby's ecosystem thrived.

Ruby on Rails is much more than a handful of libraries (ActiveRecord,
ActiveController, etc.) coupled in an MVC pattern to make life easier. If
Rails was just that without the entirety of the Ruby ecosystem, my point would
be moot. But it's not. And it's a beautiful world to live in.

I guess my point is that saying something competes with Ruby on Rails is
laughable. "A new MVC framework, for those who are familiar with Rails's
conventions" is better. But all this Ruby on Rails for Y... It's so near-
sighted.

~~~
paulcsmith
I do not think Lucky is Ruby on Rails for Crystal. There are new patterns for
just about everything. Routing is different, querying is different, views are
_very_ different.

It is Rails-like in the sense that it is aimed at productivity and developer
happiness and that it aims to have most of what you need in one package.

Of course Ruby has a better ecosystem, this is mentioned in the article. Lucky
(and Crystal) have a long way to go, but things are progressing rather quickly

