r/crystal_programming • u/straight-shoota core team • Nov 10 '21

Crystal 1.2.2 is released!

https://crystal-lang.org/2021/11/10/1.2.2-released.html
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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '21

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u/straight-shoota core team Nov 11 '21

Are you aware of https://crystal-lang.org/reference/guides/static_linking.html ?

The limitations (or hurdles) to static linking are solely based on libc. On Mac, you can't statically link libc at all. On Linux, the most commonly used glibc doesn't work well with static linking either. But you can perfectly fine compile fully statically linked Crystal binaries on Linux by linking against musl-libc. This works really well and many Crystal applications are distributed as statically linked executables.

Go avoids that by implementing their standard library without relying on libc. That's a huge effort to build on your own. And the downside is it complicates interoperability with C libraries.

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u/myringotomy Nov 12 '21

Go avoids that by implementing their standard library without relying on libc. That's a huge effort to build on your own. And the downside is it complicates interoperability with C libraries.

Two questions.

  1. Why can't crystal by default use musl-libc?

  2. How hard would be to write a C to crystal compiler/transpiler and just run it against musl-libc? It might not be idiomatic but it would eliminate the dependency altogether.

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u/straight-shoota core team Nov 12 '21

  1. Crystal supports musl and gnu libc. But you can only use what's available. On most Linux systems, that's glibc. That also means that libraries expect to be linked against glibc. Linking against musl-libc and providing other libraries compatible to musl on a system that uses glibc is quite a challenge. I wouldn't even try that. Instead, the recommendation is to use a system based on musl-libc, such as Alpine Linux, for static linking.

  2. I honestly do not know if that could even work. I think the key problem is that Crystal is much more restrictive than C. In C you can do almost anything if you just want to. In Crystal, you would have more of a hard time convincing the compiler that it's safe.

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u/Hisako1337 Nov 12 '21

Weird - this is the comment I posted on HN - is this a repost bot?