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I’ve been using Crystal on-and-off for a couple of years and have started to use it as my primary language for most non-enterprise work. The current web-app I’m

I’ve been using Crystal on-and-off for a couple of years and have started to use it as my primary language for most non-enterprise work. The current web-app I’m building is primarily written in Crystal and it has been an absolute joy to use, and even if I don’t strictly need parallelism in this project I’m glad they’re pushing though with the big language changes. It’s been so successful at everything I’ve needed it for, I wouldn’t consider going back to either Ruby or similar interpreted languages, regardless whether it’s a little CLI helper or a larger monolith server app. I’ve found my ability to allow the compiler to catch bugs incredibly reliable without feeling bogged down with types. I hadn’t worked much with typed languages previously and as a Ruby developer it allowed me to ‘learn’ types without even feeling like I was doing any learning. It’s still somewhat of an obscure language so I thought it would be helpful to describe my experiences with it.

h1d 7y ago
Do you use much external libraries because ecosystem I'd pretty much what makes a language useful after the language being solid by itself. Also, I assume Googleability is pretty much close to zero, you'd have to go to the primary sites (their forum?) to ask questions when stuck?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  It's obviously far smaller, but I've had luck so far with everything I need being available. What I've seen, mostly Postgres, Redis, and XML/HTML parsing, have also worked flawlessly so far. Having performance improvements of 100x in real-world scenarios is just astonishing. Ruby is still my go-to, especially because debugging and console support are so much better. But everything that gives me time to think gets reimplemented. ["crystal lang" <question>] usually works for google.
- jackcodes 7y ago
  There's actually a surprising amount available in the stdlib for your typical web project. By way of example, I'd always hated how in Ruby each API wrapper gem would make their own decision on which HTTP client they used, so you could end up pulling in 3 or 4 separate libraries just to make HTTP calls to a 3rd party API. People may disagree but I think this is (was?) largely due to Ruby's Net:HTTP feeling janky to use, at least compared to Faraday and the like. Here, the HTTP modules within the standard library feel right, and I've not needed to reach out for all that much from the ecosystem. But as a simple example I accept that API calls to third party services is low hanging fruit so in terms of finding drivers for lower level protocols I've not had an issue that I'd class as a blocker. There are times where I've had to extend libraries or write a parser for this-and-that (e.g. PostGIS and Paseto, both of which were unused this time round) but I find I need to do this less and less as time goes on. You do need to reach into the forums or gitter on rare occasions but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to, and it's typically because I was trying to do something unusual and quite low-level on the HTTP stack - as in something I've never had to do in a non-Crystal project, such as sending a specific packet. I've always found help there too and people are happy to engage.
freshbagels 7y ago
I'm curious as to what web-app you're building with it. Is it available to use?
- jackcodes 7y ago
  Not yet but not far off... It's an e-learning platform and student management system, backed by postgres and fronted with React. For the most part it has worked well but I need to do a bit more tightening up before I'm happy releasing it into the wild.

h1d 7y ago

Do you use much external libraries because ecosystem I'd pretty much what makes a language useful after the language being solid by itself. Also, I assume Googleability is pretty much close to zero, you'd have to go to the primary sites (their forum?) to ask questions when stuck?

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
It's obviously far smaller, but I've had luck so far with everything I need being available. What I've seen, mostly Postgres, Redis, and XML/HTML parsing, have also worked flawlessly so far. Having performance improvements of 100x in real-world scenarios is just astonishing. Ruby is still my go-to, especially because debugging and console support are so much better. But everything that gives me time to think gets reimplemented. ["crystal lang" <question>] usually works for google.
jackcodes 7y ago
There's actually a surprising amount available in the stdlib for your typical web project. By way of example, I'd always hated how in Ruby each API wrapper gem would make their own decision on which HTTP client they used, so you could end up pulling in 3 or 4 separate libraries just to make HTTP calls to a 3rd party API. People may disagree but I think this is (was?) largely due to Ruby's Net:HTTP feeling janky to use, at least compared to Faraday and the like. Here, the HTTP modules within the standard library feel right, and I've not needed to reach out for all that much from the ecosystem. But as a simple example I accept that API calls to third party services is low hanging fruit so in terms of finding drivers for lower level protocols I've not had an issue that I'd class as a blocker. There are times where I've had to extend libraries or write a parser for this-and-that (e.g. PostGIS and Paseto, both of which were unused this time round) but I find I need to do this less and less as time goes on. You do need to reach into the forums or gitter on rare occasions but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to, and it's typically because I was trying to do something unusual and quite low-level on the HTTP stack - as in something I've never had to do in a non-Crystal project, such as sending a specific packet. I've always found help there too and people are happy to engage.

freshbagels 7y ago

I'm curious as to what web-app you're building with it. Is it available to use?

jackcodes 7y ago
Not yet but not far off... It's an e-learning platform and student management system, backed by postgres and fronted with React. For the most part it has worked well but I need to do a bit more tightening up before I'm happy releasing it into the wild.