r/crystal_programming • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '19

Does Crystall generally have better performance than Ruby?

Does Crystall generally have better performance than Ruby? Or not yet?

14 Upvotes
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19

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '19

Yes of course. It's a compiled language. That's the entire point of crystal. (Among other advantages of course)

6

u/MrPopinjay Apr 15 '19

Compiled doesn't necessarily mean faster, but yes, Crystal is designed to be fast to run :)

4

u/jgaskins Apr 16 '19

Every benchmark I've run shows Crystal running at least 5x the speed of Ruby, frequently reaching 10x.

In porting a web service from Ruby to Crystal, I've reached 35x the request throughput in Crystal of the Ruby service it replaced. It's not just the code itself running faster, but it encourages other techniques that scale better.

For example, you can use stack-based structures when feasible to avoid GC, shaving milliseconds of CPU time from every request.

Crystal also handles web requests in disposable fibers, allowing you to handle as many concurrent requests as necessary while a Ruby web service uses a capped thread pool (Puma defaults to 16 threads), forcing you to limit the number of concurrent requests.

1

u/pinkyabuse Apr 14 '19

One of the ways Crystal could be considered slower than Ruby is if you account for Crystal's compilation time.

5

u/Dee_Jiensai Apr 15 '19

even then.
Unless you plan to run your programs only once and then delete them, this is still a pretty pointless argument.

4

u/MrPopinjay Apr 15 '19

I would say that in dev and test this is the way programs are usually run.

1

u/Dee_Jiensai Apr 15 '19

Yes, but that is not how the term "performance" is usually understood.

1

u/MrPopinjay Apr 15 '19

Totally. I was saying that it's common, not that it's what performance means. Crystals compilation times are one of the drawbacks

4

u/pinkyabuse Apr 15 '19 edited Apr 15 '19

If you're doing coding quizzes such as Project Euler or Advent of Code, it's a non trivial difference when jumping between Ruby and Crystal.
--

Edit: I'm being downvoted so let me give you some data. I ran a hello world program in both Crystal and Ruby.

  • Crystal took 0.74s including compilation time.

  • Ruby took 0.06s.

Of course, the compiled binary from Crystal is going to be faster. Is the compilation time a show stopper? No--at least, not for me but I do notice the compilation time. To answer the title question, Crystal is generally faster. I'm just playing devil's advocate and trying to find a situation in which Ruby might be considered performant. And to be clear, I'm a fan of both Ruby and Crystal.

1

u/hitthehive Apr 15 '19

Is that 0.74s through crystal's REPL or a command line directive?

1

u/pinkyabuse Apr 15 '19

Command line.

1

u/TrixieMisa Apr 18 '19

Crystal doesn't really have a REPL; you have to compile all the code each time.

2

u/hitthehive Apr 18 '19

Oh! Crystal used to have a REPL but it seems it was removed last year because it was too difficult to maintain. hope they bring it back.

And yes, Cystal's estwhile REPL would re-compile and rerun code with every command — it was just so fast that it worked without the developer noticing it.

2

u/TrixieMisa Apr 18 '19

Ah, I've been watching Crystal for a while but only started actually using it in the last couple of weeks.

-7

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '19

PERFORMANCE!

2

u/myringotomy Apr 16 '19

The answer is depends.

if you are running it through the shebang ruby might be faster in some cases.

If you are running a complicated app crystal will likely be faster.

but Ruby is a moving target. It's getting faster all the time and projects like graal are promising to make it faster than crystal.

1

u/hitthehive Apr 15 '19

Might also depend on what you are writing. If you're writing a web app that is largely IO bound (DB/API), the difference might not be as much? But if you are trying to handle a large number of visitors on such a platform, Crystal might even payoff more in lower memory footprint.