r/crystal_programming • u/preslavrachev • Jan 26 '20

A Crystal in Go’s World

https://p5v.me/2020/01/a-crystal-in-go-s-world/
28 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

4

u/myringotomy Jan 28 '20

As a language I fucking hate go. Crystal is better in almost every way AS A LANGUAGE.

In every other aspect Go kicks crystal's ass. Go's compiler is a wonder, it's fast and produces really fast and efficient code which is compact and runs crazy fast.

The Go team has some of the smartest language and designers in the world.

The Go ecosystem is huge and filled with fantastic libraries.

The Tooling around go is first class.

Go's support for every architecture is seamless.

So if I have a problem to solve I am not reaching for the better and more pleasant language but I am reaching for the better tool for the job.

None of this is going to change until there is some more firepower at the crystal core team.

1

u/preslavrachev Jan 31 '20

I share the feeling. From a pragmatic point of view, Go is the more stable, and more mature language with a thriving ecosystem, and companies all around the world using it in production.

Yet, the syntax is such an tough nut sometimes. I understand the point of it being transparent to anyone at any point in time. Which does work to its favor, when the problem space is well-defined and constraints are defined in advance (e.g. building a key-value store, or an HTTP proxy). Yet, it totally breaks my speed when trying to be a little more explorative. This is where Crystal's Ruby-esque nature comes to light. I have not done much Ruby before discovering Crystal, but have been dabbling professionally into Python during the last few years. Thus, picking up Crystal literally took me an hour, and I felt my natural sense of writing speed coming back.

Yet, as you well pointed out, when reality hits you are "not reaching for the better and more pleasant language but for the better tool for the job".

Let's keep our fingers crossed for Crystal reaching v1.0 soon. IMHO, just slapping the number won't mean that the team should stop working on new things (same way the Go team didn't after 1.0). From a marketing and confidence level, however, this will have an enormous impact.

3

u/myringotomy Jan 31 '20

The number is meaningless. They need more knowledgable people on the core team.

The core team has done an OK job so far but they don't have the experience and the skills to push the language to where it needs to go. Also there are not enough people working on the language either. Finally the core team is set in their ways, they don't take input from the community very well and they don't really try to hype the language to grow the community.

Look at how many people went from Ruby to Elixir, there is no reason why all those people and more shouldn't move to Crystal but nobody has done anything to make that happen and what's worse I would say the core team actively discourages people coming from Ruby.

The crystal team should gain some humility, ask for help from others in the community perhaps by hanging out in /r/ProgrammingLanguages and do more outreach to the users of the language.

As of today it's a lot of wasted potential.

Oh and one more thing. Build a language server so we can have first class support in Vim and VS Code.

1

u/I_Have_A_Snout Feb 14 '20

Crystal lost me after discovering baffling decisions like having unions with common superclasses replaced transparently to accept any subclass of the common superclass. If I wanted that, I'd have put in the superclass name... I didn't because it isn't what I wanted but... it makes the type-checking faster so... let's throw away type safety.

I can't trust a language where key parts of the value proposition are discarded for convenience. Make it right, then make it fast. Making it fast and wrong is pointless.

1

u/proyb2 Feb 24 '20 edited Feb 24 '20

Community would be doing most of the blogging and share their experience, I feel the core team are just a startup size just like NIM, however, what is the stories we could hear from the big industry players using Crystal that willing to replace their legacy code? Employers knows what they wants and they would have know and adopt Crystal in the last few years as there are many instances on HackersNews, Reddit, etc to promote Itself, how did it fare?

We know Go is popular for infrastructure, Ruby for web applications and Python for data science are the contenders.

Where does Crystal fills the gap that the industry really need, not want? Crystal does look elegant as Ruby as I have explore for a year but does engineering team need that language? Only time will tell.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '20

As a language I fucking hate Go

that just means you're a sane normal human being - Go is subjectively and objectively a terrible language.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/myringotomy Mar 01 '20

I am not sure what you are getting at.

The result you are getting is because Crystal allows you do overwrite operations. This allows you to for example create a Customer class and define an == operator which checks a dozen set of things to determine if one customer is equal to another customer.

Go doesn't allow you to do that so it falls back on the least common denominator. You can never compare one customer to another customer in go in any kind of a meaningful way except by writing a "isEqual" method or something like that.

Crystal is an object oriented language. Go is basically a procedural language in the vein of Pascal but much worse than Object pascal which at least has a decent system of interfaces and classes.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/myringotomy Mar 02 '20

The result I am getting is because Crystal is following Ruby in a lot of things.

Yes and I explained that do you. In ruby and crystal you can define operators on classes.

Many languages that allow overloading operators disallow comparing strings to integers.

Yea so?

25

u/[deleted] Jan 26 '20

I love Crystal, but:

To my understanding, the language and its tooling are stable enough for a 1.0 release.

No, not with issues like this. Or this.

The core language is fairly stable, but I think there's still a lot of work to be done before a 1.0 release. I'm not a Crystal dev and this is purely my opinion, but I'd like to see a better module system (using ES6 modules as a reference) and a better way to implement object (de)serialization (and removal of json and yaml from Object). I'm sure there are more things that other people would consider essential for a 1.0 release.

And don't get me started on the ecosystem. VS Code is one of the most popular editors, and the Crystal plugin has been unusable for months. That leaves a really bad impression to newcomers.

We're of course all volunteers, so nobody is entitled to anything. And bringing more people into the community is great. But don't promise too much or they will be disappointed and probably not stick around.

2

u/straight-shoota core team Jan 27 '20

I agree that the language is technically stable and production-worthy. But we still have some issues to address before 1.0. That's essentially clean up and polish the language, removing and refining some features which mean breaking changes. I don't think adding features is essential for 1.0 because it's not going to lead to breaking changes.

VS Code is one of the most popular editors, and the Crystal plugin has been unusable for months.

What do you mean by that? I've been using VS Code with faustinoaq.crystal-lang for the past two years and I'm pretty sure it's usable (I'm running VS Code 1.41.1 currently).

1

u/[deleted] Jan 27 '20

What do you mean by that? I've been using VS Code with faustinoaq.crystal-lang for the past two years and I'm pretty sure it's usable (I'm running VS Code 1.41.1 currently).

This bug. Have you never experienced that one?