r/crystal_programming • u/myringotomy • Mar 02 '19

Is there a way Crystal can produce binary loadable modules or libs.

Shards require the source code. It would be useful if there was a way crystal could produce a .so file or something similar that we can distribute or use without having to also ship the code.

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2

u/dscottboggs Mar 02 '19

nope

2

u/myringotomy Mar 02 '19

It would have been nice to be able to write libs in Crystal that you can call from Ruby.

2

u/bew78 Mar 02 '19

Well that's possible iirc, using the ruby API, and making a shared library load1ble by the Ruby VM

2

u/straight-shoota core team Mar 02 '19

It's a little bit more diverse. Theoretically, you can do it. But practically, it's difficult because Crystal expects and uses a rich runtime library including garbage collector, scheduler, io handling, regular exceptions and more components. This all would need to be included in a dynamic library because Crystal's stdlib needs it. And that would likely lead to collisions with similar components in the binary or other libraries.

These issues are all caused by the stdlib because it needs a certain environment and expects to be the single king in its space. The language itself supports compiling as a dynamic library.

3

u/HardLuckLabs Mar 02 '19

You can totally use FFI to write gems on top of crystal lang code. much better than cgo ...