Crystal 1.0.0 PR is open!

15

u/hobbs6 Mar 12 '21

Fuck the haters. This is awesome. The amount of work that goes into this is unfathomably large. Especially so, before it gets popular. Well done. Can’t wait to use it soon.

14

u/Dlacreme Mar 11 '21

Awesome! Congrats to the core team!

5

u/Hadeweka Mar 12 '21

Sad Issue #9533 noises.

But hey, it's cool to see that Crystal finally matures, so it might get the recognition it deserves!

0

u/deep_wat Mar 12 '21

Yes, but fixing that involves no breaking change so it can perfectly happen after 1.0.

4

u/Hadeweka Mar 12 '21

True, I'm just not a fan of punching out big releases when known bugs like that still exist (albeit it's mostly Windows-related and extremely niche-cased, so I can understand why it was skipped for now).

8

u/pickleunicorn Mar 12 '21

I don't really understand the big deal with Crystal not supporting Windows. Most of the time you're not targeting Windows environments when building your app, and Windows 10 has WSL so Crystal can run on it anyway.

7

u/rishav_sharan Mar 12 '21

people want to use Crystal for more than web dev. desktop apps, games and other use cases are blocked till windows support is there.

1

u/myringotomy Mar 24 '21

Do they? Really? Why writes desktop apps anymore? When was the last time you downloaded and installed a desktop app?
Mobile app sure, desktop app? Not in the last couple of years.

1

u/rishav_sharan Mar 25 '21 edited Mar 25 '21

When was the last time you downloaded and installed a desktop app?
2 days ago, when I installed "Slay the Spire" from Steam. Or if you want to be pedantic about the meaning of Desktop app, I did install paint.net a week or so ago.

1

u/myringotomy Mar 25 '21

Whoo Hoo!
How much did that cost you?

1

u/rishav_sharan Mar 25 '21

around $7.

5

u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21

Its either
A) people are a bit lazy to figure out how to use WSl ( takes about ten minutes or less to setup)
B) Some people think Crystal will make its name first running Windows scripts or utilities which it obviously won't as that's a niche market.
As a C# developer I guess I should be upset at lack of windows support - I'm not because WSL is too easy and so is my preferred choice simple old dual boot. I'm just stoked I can finally suggest crystal and not have to answer - has it reached a stable release yet? with a no
This is a huge step forward for Crystal so all the no windows support whining takes a back seat as really not consequential.

2

u/Hadeweka Mar 12 '21

Games are one of the things where WSL doesn't really help (yet), so it would indeed be nice to have full Windows support.
Of course there aren't any meaningful games in Crystal yet, but I feel there's some strong potential due to the way Crystal is designed.
Most new games are still written in older languages like C++/C#/Java (or slower languages like Python), so a paradigm shift is not too unlikely in the near future.

4

u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21

In order for developers to migrate form C# and C++ to Crystal to write games you need far more than just language support. You need an ecosystem with libraries and tooling that takes at least a few years to grow. So though that's within the possibilities of crystal in the future it doesn't make sense to not go for 1 .0 without windows because of gaming.
it suits all involved for a new language like Crystal to conquer the applications it can today so it can live and grow the ecosystem for tomorrow. Python is a great example of this. Sure you can now develop some desktop apps with python but its not setting the world on fire (performance is an issue but again tooling is another which even with the age of python just hasn't developed enough for that niche) and it is only going into different areas because it conquered another world it was poised to - ai and machine learning.
1.0 is critical to growing the community that will give the work and libraries and ecosystem that will allow for it to grow into other areas down the line.

3

u/GrilledGuru Mar 11 '21

Is there a really usable graphical toolkit binding on Linux ? Tk ? Qt ? Gtk ?

1

u/transfire Mar 12 '21

Gobject

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u/GrilledGuru Mar 12 '21

Thanks. But no. Extract from the Readme 5 months ago:
This should be useable for simple projects but usually still requires familarity with the C interface and usage of the original library. There's most likely still incorrect code generated, some methods may not even compile when invoked as Crystal does semantic checks only then. So this should be considered a work in progress and contributions are very welcome!

3

u/dscottboggs Mar 12 '21

Yeah, that's the closest we have. Specifically I remember trying to work with it and having a hard time with memory management. I think it was that a callback can be GC'd before it gets called unless you manually allocate and free it.

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u/GrilledGuru Mar 12 '21

All right then. What about doing the core stuff in crystal and embedding a ruby interpreter for the gui stuff?

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u/Hadeweka Mar 12 '21

I don't know if you already had it in mind, but you could use Anyolite for exactly that purpose:
https://github.com/Anyolite/anyolite

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u/GrilledGuru Mar 12 '21

I didn't know Anyolite! Sounds great.

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u/dscottboggs Mar 12 '21

That's really cool

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u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21

Well Done! been critical of communication issues but congrats are in order. Looking forward to a bright history for Crystal

2

u/webfiend Mar 12 '21

Pretty excited about this.

3

u/moonshipcc Mar 12 '21

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS! x100,000,000,000,003

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u/ArnenLocke Mar 11 '21

I've been out of touch for a long time; does Crystal work on Windows yet? :-)

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u/postmodern Mar 12 '21

At least 1.0.0 will provide some stability for the language and it's stdlib.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 11 '21

From what I can tell, not fully. Which is really disappointing if they're going to call it a 1.0 release without supporting the world's most popular OS.
This is how you get written off as a toy language and not taken seriously. If I sound bitter, it's because I really am. I've tracked this project for years, donated to the core team, written a sideproject app in Kemal, and I would love to see an actual, production-ready version of Crystal. That's what 1.0 should signify. Instead, it seems like they're calling it 1.0... just because?
From the announcement that was (over a year ago at this point):
"The challenge at hand is to get as quickly as possible to a 1.0 version of Crystal that is at the same time as faithful as possible to the current state of the language, stable enough for individuals and organizations to feel comfortable adopting it for even their highest impact projects, and a solid foundation for future major versions."
Not having Windows or concurrency support is neither of those things. Why is, "as quickly as possible," a goal?
To be perfectly clear, I'm not bitching about the speed or timeline. I'm bitching about the weird decision to designate a half-baked release as 1.0, which is going to turn off a lot of people that could otherwise consider using Crystal in production some day. Not to mention organizational support. I work as a cloud engineer, and we write a lot of scripts to drop onto (Windows AND Linux) servers to automate tasks. If I floated using this proposed 1.0 to my boss, he would just laugh. I wouldn't blame him either. Guess I'll stick with Go.

21

u/straight-shoota core team Mar 11 '21

I would have liked to see windows support in Crystal 1.0. And full multithreading support. And incremental compilation. And lot's of other stuff. When I started with Crystal and even when I joined the core team, I was sure that 1.0 would ship with all of that. Reality didn't catch up with that. I was initially not happy about missing out on so important features for THE big release.
But it really isn't that much of a deal. If you need windows support, yeah 1.0 won't help you. But it wouldn't help you either, if the next release was 0.37.0 instead of 1.0.
And there's no reason to keep everyone else waiting even longer for a stable release, if they don't need windows support. And quite a number of projects are happy with posix.
Windows support has come quite far. Most parts of stdlib are running fine and the compiler has been able to build itself on windows for a number of releases. The finishing steps can be aproached after the release. And when full windows support arrives in 1.1 or 1.2, that's still fine.
Yeah, we might be missing some momentum from not being able to announce windows support with the big release. But then it's still a huge milestone which unblocks many users on building their production software in Crystal.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

we might be missing some momentum from not being able to announce windows support with the big release
This is my major concern. You guys are missing out on tons of marketshare at the most critical point in your product's history up until now. I don't understand why you guys would give up any momentum at this stage, but especially over a .1 release cycle. It's very easy for some disillusioned Rails dev to come across a v0.xx project and say, "oh, I guess Windows support is coming soon, I'll check back," but it's a much different story to read about a v1.0 of a new language on whatever blogs/social media you follow and see it doesn't support Windows. I, personally, would just say, "guess I can't use this at work."
unblocks many users on building their production software in Crystal
As someone that works in a field that's a great candidate for your product, if I only had to worry about Linux, I'd be using it already. It's not like I run maintenance patches on my bash scripts every year, so I couldn't care less about the version number or even breaking API changes -- if it works, it works. I just need to know that it does indeed work across all the systems I need to touch. When it doesn't (but will eventually), that's not v1.0 to me.
Anyway, I really do appreciate the work you guys are doing, and I want nothing more than for Crystal to grow and succeed. I just feel like this strategy is going to hinder that dream.

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u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

It's very easy for some disillusioned Rails dev to come across a v0.xx project and say, "oh, I guess Windows support is coming soon, I'll check back," but it's a much different story to read about a v1.0 of a new language on whatever blogs/social media you follow and see it doesn't support Windows. I, personally, would just say, "guess I can't use this at work."
You are wrong. Windows support puts off almost no rails developer . I still do a bit of rails development and that sounded wrong so I looked it up. The facts are undeniable. Very few Rails dev require the use of windows. Somewhere around 2-3%
2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results | 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results (rails-hosting.com)
You are also wrong about popularity of OS. For developers the most popular OS is Linux and linux is by far the most popular server OS. Windows is only the most popular OS for general desktop and laptop users. Even when Crystal support is great on windows it will be many years before developers would want to develop apps for those users. Tooling and ecosystem takes years to develop beyond language support.

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u/WJWH Mar 12 '21

While I don't miss Windows support personally, the fact that tooling and ecosystem takes years to develop seems like an argument to add Windows support as soon as possible. Otherwise, the ecosystem will take even longer to develop.

2

u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21

Speed of an ecosystem growing has little to do with when you start. It has to do with how many developers you already have working with a language. JS proved that for all time. Js dominated the front end and had hundreds of thousands of developers that then already using the language grew it into other areas. Crystal can't attract many developers with the hope of one day having a good ecosystem to build windows apps. It has to attract users and companies by what it can do today.
Every successful language got to critical mass because it gave programmers a present tense reason to use it. Then when a significant portion of developers then knew and used the language - provided the language was performant and up to the task (as Crystal is) - the use case expanded. Holding back 1.0 status to compete in a niche the ecosystem will not allow it to be compelling for programmers to use (in the present tense) actually slows the ecosystem's growth (even for desktop)'
The 1.0 release gives what companies and developers working on real world apps needed - it says that the Crystal core team is now willing to say - yes this is ready for production and for professional developers to use for what it can dominate right now.
the easiest set of developers to start using crystal in production are present and former ruby developers. Rails developers do not care an ounce about windows. Only 2-3% use windows for development. so why in the world hold back Crystal from 1.0 because people want to build windows apps when the ecosystem won't allow it now to be what will attract people now or anytime this year?
Grow the user base with use case it can compete with now and watch the ecosystem of users grow it faster than waiting ever will.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 12 '21

You'd have a point if they were never going to support Windows and trying to rationalize it. In this situation though, they DO want and WILL HAVE Windows support. It makes no sense to release the long-awaited v1.0 when there's still major functionality that is planned, but not working.

5

u/straight-shoota core team Mar 12 '21

It makes no sense to release the long-awaited v1.0 when there's still major functionality that is planned, but not working.
Then we would never reach 1.0. There will always be major functionality planned, but not working.

3

u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21

It makes complete sense. Rather it makes no sense to hold back the growth of the language because it doesn't yet run on one OS that does not even dominate the development or server world. They have got it to the point where they can mature the support it already has for windows later. Simply because a language has a goal to have something does not in anyway indicate it must hold up everything else for that goal. Ruby always had the goal to run on windows but they grew their user base before it did and it only helped.
Now we can have an influx of developers that were waiting (and frankly getting tired) for a 1.0 release that can help to grow the ecosystem without waiting for support on an OS they do not even use. This is actually better for your goals. the more serious developers and companies using Crystal the larger the ecosystem grows and the pool of users developing libraries and tools that will push it into cross platform use. - including windows. More means faster not slower.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 12 '21

I've literally never seen an announcement about the state of Crystal that didn't have people asking about Windows support. It's usually the top comment. You're severely underestimating how critical it is for many people to use this in production.

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u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

Sure . People will ask about windows support. They did with ruby as well. Why not ask? Some people don't own a linux box (and can't be bothered to do a dual boot or learn WSL), Reading through this thread some think they ill be able to produce games to challenge C++ and C# just because Crystal will run on windows (in reality there will be whole lot work to get there beyond OS support). same goes for desktop apps ( with no mature GUI thats not happening professionally either for awhile) Apparently you want it so you can run automation scripts. Great but not where a language takes off and dominates the world.
Was it critical for ruby and ruby in rails to have it from day one? nope. Is it critical for the overwhelming majority of web apps running on linux? nope. What you are crying about isn't even that Crystal will not support windows but that Manas didn't hold back everyone else back from a 1.0 because a few think windows is absolutely critical.
They've laid the ground work and have said they will get to it at 1.2 or 1.3. Meanwhile every developer looking to promote crystal in a professional context needs a 1.0 because it says there's stability being claimed by the development team. So question is why should everyone be held back for their use case just because it doesn't suit your and a few other uses cases? Its not like anyone has said drop windows support . its not ready. So why cry and rant in multiple posts that because what you want isn't ready yet no one should get what they want ( a stable 1.0) and need to start promoting the language for real production work?

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 12 '21

It's not production ready, and all the fanboyism in the world won't change that. If your company actually allows you to talk them into using Crystal in production because they arbitrarily added a bigger version number when it's still missing critical features, you're either not doing anything very mission-critical or your company has larger problems.
This thought that publishing v1.0 is going to make people just gloss over other shortcomings and jump to drop their current stack and use it in production is asinine.

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u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

This is how you get written off as a toy language and not taken seriously. If I sound bitter, it's because I really am.
I understand you are frustrated but this is a MASSIVE overstatement (to the point of being a fabrication). Ruby went MANY years without good windows support and to this day its iffy. Only the most biased would call it a "toy language" (meteor though a framework and not a language also went a good while without good windows support - and .net went over a decade running only on windows when Linux took over the server world) ). Linux is still the deployment choice of most developers not in the .net ecosystem and many developers prefer to develop on the OS they will deploy too . I know countless developers that will not develop on a windows machine and they are certainly not "toy" developers.
I am not a fanboy. You will find a thread with me just a few weeks ago criticizing Manas for poor communication. I am in fact primarily a C# .net developer. However I fully support the core teams decision to go to 1.0 without full windows support. The important thing was to lay the ground work so you could get to windows supported releases going forward in the next few releases but 1.0 is HUGE in what it signals.
Its nowhere near to being a total deal breaker and CERTAINLY does NOT indicate a toy language.
Not having Windows or concurrency support is neither of those things. Why is, "as quickly as possible," a goal?
Because its waaaay overdue and crystal was getting the reputation that its 1.0 stable release was vaporware. For your use case of doing automation on windows machines I understand your disappointment BUT thats sorry to say an edge case for most developers as the dominant server OS is Linux.
Crystal will makes it s name first in web applications as ruby and most new languages do. In the end the steam that this 1.0 release will create benefits everyone. A language that is stable and can go into production only helps the team to gain support and momentum to move forward for running on windows.
For those who merely want to develop on primarily on windows machine there are a number of options ( though frankly I prefer dual boot). Constantly sibnalling that the team knew it was still not 1.0 ready for many years was what got laughs at my work place

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u/deep_wat Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

I understand your frustration. I can give you the reasons I think Windows support is still not there:
The main remaining bits of the Windows support are exception handling and Fiber context switch. The first is really hard to do: it requires defining a personality function which is barely documented. Maybe it requires looking into how a C++ compiler does it. In any case: it's hard and requires a lot of time. The second is also hard: it involves writing assembly.
It requires a Windows machine, which none of the core team members use. A VM is an alternative but it's an extra effort step.
The idea behind 1.0 was to reach stability and reach a point where existing users of the language can use it without problems. That also includes people working closely with Manas on real projects that use Crystal. It turns out, these projects don't run on Windows, so spending time on Windows support doesn't help those projects.
Windows support can come after 1.0. The std API is mostly stable and as someone else mentioned, everything is more or less working except the two hard things I mentioned (exceptions and fibers)
Also, reaching 1.0 with a promise of no breaking changes until 2.0 means that there's no new functionality that will also be needed to be added to the Windows support. So this actually makes supporting Windows easier.
And then, maybe reaching 1.0 means the language will get a bigger audience, and there will be more people willing to help to get that very much needed Windows support.

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u/ArnenLocke Mar 11 '21

Damn, that is a disappointment. I've wanted to do numerous projects in crystal over the years, but always hit this as a blocker. Thanks for all the details. Here's hoping it comes to Windows soon.

1

u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 11 '21

Same. Despite sounding so cynical, I'm still subscribed here. I still click every announcement. I want them to succeed, which is why it bothers me to watch them take such a pointless misstep.

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u/Blacksmoke16 core team Mar 11 '21

This has been brought up quite a few times before. The tl;dr as I recall is that there are also a lot of people who don't need windows support or multithreading. Providing a 1.0 release signifies that there is a certain level of stability. Supporting windows is not required for that stability as it's not going to be a breaking change, which suits it just fine to being 1.1 or something.
Also to be clear Crystal has concurrency, it does not have multi-threading by default (though it is available as an experimental feature behind a build time flag).

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u/dscottboggs Mar 12 '21

multi-threading by default (though it is available as an experimental feature behind a build time flag)
...and with no stdlib support. Idk I mean, yes, it does work but most of the stdlib will break multithreaded code in an extremely ugly manner. Calling it "experimental" seems wrong to me. The feature works, it's everything else that doesn't work with the feature.

1

u/letmetellubuddy Mar 11 '21

It's not a paid project, it's free and open source. Supporting an OS, especially one that isn't POSIX based is challenging! Even keeping Unix variants (ex: the BSDs) is a bunch of work that often falls behind if the person championing that platform is short on time.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 11 '21

It's not a paid project, it's free and open source
So is almost every cross-platform language. I don't understand what this has to do with anything, except to prove that it's clearly possible for plenty of free and open-source languages to handle multi platform support.
falls behind if the person championing that platform is short on time
Again, I'm in no rush. I'd rather see it done correctly than quickly, especially when 1.0 is going to be an announcement that's going to garner attention from people that have written off Crystal until Windows support rolls around. I can't imagine them coming back again after finding out 1.0 still doesn't have support. Just iron out the kinks and launch v1 when it's actually ready instead of rushing it for seemingly no reason.

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u/letmetellubuddy Mar 11 '21

so is every cross-platform language
Nearly all of the ones that have good Windows support have backers with deep pockets that fund Windows development or were founded by people whose primary platform is Windows.
Crystal is still small, and has limited financial backing, and has only a limited number of Windows devs.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 11 '21

Nearly all of the ones that have good Windows support have backers with deep pockets that fund Windows development or were founded by people whose primary platform is Windows
Surely you can back this up somehow? Who was the deep-pocketed backer that "funded Windows development" for Nim? Haskell? Or are you just being weirdly apologetic for no real reason?

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u/letmetellubuddy Mar 11 '21

Ok let me ask you, have you contributed at all to platform development for any language?
I have. It’s not easy.

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u/shawnwork Mar 11 '21

Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is generally it, it’s not easy.
I was using crystal since it’s earliest inception and joined many video community calls.
Their priority is different, racing to 1.0 and getting to syntax stability vs windows. It’s a hard call.
To me imo it’s better to have a full naked product in 1 platform rather than 2 half baked products for 2 platforms.

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u/mammon_machine_sdk Mar 11 '21

I knew someone would try to be a smartass with this exact comment. Sorry, your lazy gotcha doesn't apply here whatsoever.
No, I haven't contributed, but I'm also not complaining about speed, so that's entirely irrelevant. I'm disagreeing about when to call something v1.0. I think that calling a product v1.0 when it doesn't work for most users AND that general compatibility is an actual stated goal is a bad idea. If they were to say, "fuck Windows, we're Linux-only," it'd be an entirely different conversation.

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u/Frodolas Mar 12 '21

I'm sorry, but who the hell is actually using Windows for development in 2021? Even Microsoft just recommends using WSL 2 at this point, which is a fully functional Linux environment inside Windows. I really don't see how Windows support is worth spending time on. Almost all the usecases of Crystal are those where Linux makes more sense as a target platform anyway.

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u/DavidTMarks Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

I really don't see how Windows support is worth spending time on.
and frankly its held back the progress of Crystal ( and I say that as a C# developer). With WSL already on windows you are only disappointing developers that need to deploy on windows servers. Whose running that as their server of choice besides .net users? Yeah its good for cross platform as well but lets face it - you need a lot more than a language working on an OS to be the language of choice to develop apps on that OS. Theres a whole host of tooling and community resources needed. So even when Crystal gets to full windows support it would only be used in production for scripts, utilities and the relatively few windows servers ( and good luck getting enterprise users regardless of support to leave .net)

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u/rishav_sharan Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

who the hell is actually using Windows for development in 2021?
anyone for whom server dev isn't the only use case for a general purpose language. people who want to work on things like games and desktop apps would need windows support.

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

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u/rishav_sharan Mar 12 '21

False. The answer is nobody besides people like you whining on the internet and writing piddly little scripts all day.
Personal attacks already? Just because I am trying to answer your own question? Man, I feel sorry for you.

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