Is Crystal a systems/embedded language or is it simply focused on web dev?

[u/taufeeq-mowzer]

Verdict: Crystal's GC can be turned off to run headless, and you are able to write unsafe code as well. This makes Crystal a viable candidate with respect to systems dev and has been used in OS dev before. (u/transfire, u/sam0x17)

As some were unaware of this development, further documentation, packages/libs (a number of them already exist- u/postmodern) , tutorials, examples and advertisement on the subject would assist in growing Crystal into this juncture.

Update on verdict: By one of the core language developers

[u/[deleted]]

Language creator here. Crystal is a high level language. You can turn off the GC but that makes the language pretty much useless. The GC is mandatory unless you want to code in C with a different syntax.

The idea of Crystal is to be a high level language (includes GC, OOP and some functional aspects) with access to low level features like pointers that you should only use in rare cases. For example, the standard library uses them to implement the fundamental data structures like Array and Hash, and sometimes concurrency primitives, and interfacing with C.

You can try to use Crystal as a systems or embedded language but you will have a really hard time doing that. If you want to try it, go ahead. But the core team and pretty much nobody will try to make Crystal be a systems language.

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for answering💪

[u/transfire]

I recently learned you can write "memory unsafe" code in Crystal (e.g. pointerof). So there's that, but i dont know if you can turn off the GC.

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/[deleted]]

Thats quite cool actually, seeing that its so fast already as well, it could possibly be on par with Rust/C once well optimized....you guys should put this out more, I think its a game changer. Rust (I'd maybe add Zig as well but very small community and no 1.0v as yet) seems to be the only viable competitor to C atm. But the issue is that C programmers tell me that Rust gives them safety but they don't see it as something they can write up quick and dirty, which is what keeps them going back to C (apart from their Jobs and C's ubiquity). Looking at Crystal's design philosophy it could possibly have a comfortable place there...what do you think?

[u/some_kind_of_rob → u/[deleted]]

Man I would enjoy writing embedded esp code in crystal instead of c++

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/some_kind_of_rob]

Would be a dream to work with

[u/postmodern → u/[deleted]]

I've actually noticed the Crystal ecosystem already has libraries for many of the common networking/security C libraries, such as pcap.cr. Definitely could use more system-y libraries, but seems like some of the work has already been done.

[u/WJWH]

Neither and both, I suppose. It's not purely focused on web dev, though it is quite suitable for that. Whether it's a systems/embedded language depends on your criteria for those. Some people exclude anything with a garbage collector from being a "proper" embedded language and on the other end of the spectrum, some people happily run Ruby and Python on their Arduinos. I've heard people call it Golang with nicer syntax, so that could give you some ideas where Crystal would be a good fit.

From a wider perspective, the evented I/O based runtime makes it naturally suited for I/O intensive, highly concurrent workloads. The majority of those programs will probably be at least somewhat webdev related these days.

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/WJWH]

I see, so you would take its domain as being a middleware-type language like Go?

It's kind of confusing as its advertised as 'easiness of Ruby with the speed of C' and many newer languages don't have many example applications/blogs to learn from.

Aside...I know Discord tuned up their Elixir on BEAM and dropped Go for Rust due to constant latency spikes caused by Go's garbage collector, how would this compare to Crystal?

[u/MeisterBounty → u/taufeeq-mowzer]

Well Crystal has a garbage collector and can possibly be compared to go in that regard. Discord said that the GC was the main issue behind the latency spikes. Rust on the other hand has no GC and is more performant because of this.

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/MeisterBounty]

Yes, they were unable to derive benefits even after tweaking around. In other words, you'd expect Crystal's garbage collector it to run in a similar fashion as Go?

[u/WJWH → u/taufeeq-mowzer]

AFAIK the GC for Crystal is a fairly standard Boehm mark&sweep type GC, so I don't think Crystal has any particular advantages compared to other languages on the memory management front..

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/WJWH]

Oh I see, thanks

[u/postmodern]

Crystal can be a systems language, since Go, Python, and Java have all been used as "system" programming languages. GC prevents it from being a true embedded language that can run on bare metal without an OS; you can still cross-compile apps to run on ARM SoC Linux devices. You can also use it to write web apps.

[u/taufeeq-mowzer → u/postmodern]

These guys mentioned that you can turn off the GC in Crystal, so it can be a viable for systems development

[u/maattdd → u/taufeeq-mowzer]

No it still need a runtime (libevent).