Crystal is a general purpose, statically-typed, object-oriented, and compiled programming language coming from Manas Tech. The language has been in development since 2014 (for about 6 years now) and the most recent language version is 0.35.1. While everyone eagerly waits the official release of version 1.0 of Crystal, I came across this language and wanted to take a first look. This article is the result of that first look at Crystal for a few hours. Coming from Ruby/Rails and Elixir/Phoenix background, I felt naturally inclined to look at this Ruby like slick programming language.
As mentioned on the github page of Crystal, the main motivation behind the language development being -
- We love Ruby’s efficiency for writing code.
- We love C’s efficiency for running code.
- We want the best of both worlds.
- We want the compiler to understand what we mean without having to specify types everywhere.
- We want full OOP.
Oh, and we don’t want to write C code to make the code run faster.
In this article, I wanted to express my experience spending a few hours with Crystal and its ecosystem. I would thing the major audience of this language would be web developers coming from Ruby/Rails background. Due to my limited exposure, I will not cover any web framework in this article but there do exist some web frameworks already, most notable being -
- Amber — https://amberframework.org
- Lucky — https://www.luckyframework.org
- Kemal — https://kemalcr.com
Installing Crystal
It is possible to install Crystal on Mac OS using Homebrew using below commands —
$ brew update
$ brew install crystal
But I prefer to install using asdf version manager in case I need to install multiple versions for some reason. asdf has a plugin for Crystal — https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-crystal
I used the below commands to install the plugin —
_$ asdf plugin-add crystal https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-crystal.git --> _installs the plugin for asdf
_$ asdf install crystal 0.35.1 --> _installs Crystal 0.35.1
_$ asdf global crystal 0.35.1 --> _sets global version of Crystal as 0.35.
We can see the version of Crystal compiler installed using below command —
#programming-languages #ruby #software-development #ruby-on-rails #crystal-lang
