Oh man I just love and adore Crystal. I am a long time rubyist and I have to say they just nailed it with Crystal. I just wish I had more opportunity to use it professionally!

It must be time to take my Ruby skills and go and learn this. Is it really as easy as it sounds like it should be for a lazy, dynamic-typing sort of Ruby dev to pick up?

If you have never worked with a strongly typed language before there might be some getting used to that, but any pain is well worth it. Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing. Oh and it’s literally 100x faster than Ruby in some cases.

> Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing

It would be, but IME Crystal, or statically typed programming languages that don't have a type system at least as powerful as Haskells in general, don't get anywhere remotely close to that, and the overhead added to get what they do give is of dubious net benefit outside of large projects.

And even with Haskell, while you can express a much richer set of constraints in types, there's also more space for bugs in the type level programming.

I don't get it. How many types do I need, before the kind of data I am talking about becomes better represented by an object comprised of smaller pieces?

Why would I want to spend my time "type level programming"?

Maybe I don't understand what's meant by a type. Is it on the level of string/double/int, or is it expected to cover more (string with a well formatted ISO 8601 datetime, etc)? What is accomplished that couldn't be done in vanilla Ruby with an object representing a more complex datatype with its own getters/setters to cover validation?

Every mistake? Wow. I rarely make that kind of mistake, I usually screw up the logic.

Crystal is wonderful for one-off programs in my experience.

Elixir had a long startup time for one-off scripts in my experience, but Elixir’s syntax is still one of my favorites for scripting.

Is a 100ms startup time really a big deal for something that is either going to be manually triggered or cronjobbed and expected to take on the order of minutes?

Those sorts of startup times discourage writing command-line tools (e.g. composable text processing things one might join with pipes).

Ruby scripting has occupied the sysadmin space for over a decade yet on my 2013 Macbook Pro the latest Ruby 2.6.5 takes around 250ms to start. That's a mere 1/4 of a second. Sure, Python, Perl and PHP have shorter startup times but surely this is a non-problem?

No, things like sort, grep, uniq, cut, wc, cat, awk, sed, tr, etc etc. You wouldn't want them to take 1/4 second to start up.

Crystal's startup time is not great though. 700ms vs 100ms for ruby.

Compared with

   time crystal eval <<<"puts 1"
   time ruby <<<"puts 1"

You know that you are timing the compiler and not the compiled program here?

Rather try "echo 'puts 1' > puts.cr && crystal build puts.cr && time ./puts"

BTW, you can dramatically decrease the cold startup times of ruby if you call it with the options '--disable-gems --disable-rubyopt' if that's an option to you. For many scripts it certainly is.

But even on a 8 years old machine with spinning rust, after the ruby stuff is cached in the OS filesystem cache, my startup time are smaller than 10ms.