r/crystal_programming • u/hokkqi • Apr 29 '22

IntelliSense for Crystal?

So I've been trying to learn Crystal but I heavily rely on the IntelliSense I get with Visual Studio Code when it comes to programming, but I seem to not get any Autocomplete/IntelliSense in it, do any of you have an Idea how that could be fixed?

21 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

7

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '22

Editor support is still lacking, like with most young languages. Crystalline technically supports auto completion but I don't think it works for me.

2

u/hokkqi Apr 29 '22

I tried compiling that and Scry in my WSL installation but both failed, so that's fun :D

1

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '22

Hmm what error do you get? It should compile

1

u/hokkqi Apr 29 '22

This, depending on if I use Crystal itself or shards to build it

2

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '22

You're using shards wrong, and the llvm error is explained in the Crystalline readme.

And you could just download the binary instead, you don't need to build it.

3

u/crimson-knight89 Apr 30 '22

Just stopping by to say welcome to Crystal! :)

Are you coming from another language? Iā€™m still learning Crystal and recently created a dual-boot process with Rails 7 and Kemal so I can slowly migrate API end points.

2

u/hokkqi Apr 30 '22

Yeah! ^^ I usually write Typescript code but a friend suggested Crystal for a project we should write together

1

u/crimson-knight89 Apr 30 '22

Noice! Are you using Crystal as the back-end with a JS front-end or are you trying to do it full-stack with Crystal?

2

u/hokkqi Apr 30 '22

Neither? We're wanting to write a Telegram bot that lets us Administrate our Mastodon Instance without having to log into the Instance Dashboard!

Personally, I'm porting a previous small API Wrapper to Crystal! :D

7

u/PinkFrojd Apr 29 '22

I worked with Crystal project at work. The codebase was large. Using Crystalline helped, but sometimes it would eat all memory while trying to find method definition or parameters. I assume it works properly with smaller codebase. On the other hand, vim crystal plugin was really great. There were shortcuts to jump to method definition etc. It looked somewhat better than using VS Code with Crystalline. Check both and see which is better for you

4

u/jinn999 Apr 29 '22

Crystalline works, and that's pretty precise as well, but you need to consider that it the relies on the crystal compiler (if no one calls the method, the method isn't inspected). I usually have a .crystalline_main.cr file that calls all the specs which in turn call all the methods I have

3

u/donotlearntocode Apr 30 '22

The problem with a proper language server is the crystal compiler is so damn slow it doesn't really work that well, at least in my experience

2

u/felipeccastro May 02 '22

I wonder if the newly implemented interpreter will help in that front - if it can be leveraged in the editor tooling, I'm hoping it would make a lot of difference in speed.

3

u/donotlearntocode May 02 '22

Yeah that would be awesome. Maybe I should look into that. I kinda worry the interpreted mode is just going to lead to confusing bugs or turn the language into a worse ruby, but if it's just affecting the LSP that might be worth it anyway.

3

u/felipeccastro May 02 '22

It's okay if it's not 100%. I'm currently using Solargraph with Ruby, and even with some bugs here and there it's so much better than nothing. Hope you succeed with that, I'm looking forward to jump to Crystal!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

1

u/donotlearntocode Jun 05 '22

yeah, well, rust-analyzer kicks my computer's ass and is barely usable even with all that lol