> I think they meant younger.

The "even OCaml" is what threw me. Still not quite sure if they meant older or younger from it.

> But, yeah, besides the syntax familiarity for Ruby programmers it doesn't seem offer much that the others do.

A familiar syntax is a huge benefit in a lot of contexts. There's plenty of Ruby-only shops around the world. Making a faster and statically-typed language accessible to them is a decent niche.

Crystal isn't quite Ruby. It has type guarantees that Ruby doesn't, which makes it easier to maintain. The async and parallel stories are also immensely better in Crystal than Ruby.

The "Nil is a compile-time error" is also a feature I highly appreciate.

Okay, port your existing Ruby code to a compiled language, giving it multiple times the speed? Maybe three is a slight business opportunity here.

Also, give your developers a more productive language that can go where Ruby can't (like OS development), which is 90% instantly recognizable — may also be worth something?

Is it really so hard to port Ruby code to any of the languages I mentioned? Even with Crystal you will still have to make changes to your code, is having to use a slightly different syntax such a big difference? If you've got Ruby code and you haven't already ported it, how badly do you need the speed?

Mentally context switching between Ruby and any other language to do the translation actually is kind of a hassle.

I could imagine, that the subtle differences could get you ugly problems while porting.

Won't the differences be more subtle and difficult if you use a language that's syntactically Ruby-like but not actually Ruby?

Well it seems most developers here would rather use Ruby + several memory-optimised VM clusters to make their services go faster and destroy their balance sheet than to use a faster language that is efficient in memory and is also blazing fast.

A rewrite in (other fast language) from Ruby sounds ridiculous as soon as you include writing a extra FFI wrapper around this you have to maintain so that would be out of the picture and that sounds a lot harder than a semi 1:1 port of the source code.

The trouble is Ruby itself is starting to become a sunken cost as a language but is survived because of Rails, thus also explains the countless memory issues that happen when developers use it. So for a stopgap to something sort of better, I would rather port to Crystal or Elixir so I can run on those low-cost VMs and save cash.

Slightly different?

I understood that Crystal is a huge thing for Ruby devs.

I just want to know if it is more than that or not.

I'm not a fan of Ruby and would prefer Nim or Rust if it were about syntax.

I ask myself if I miss any huge speciality of Crystal if I dismiss it just because of its syntax.