Crystal is supposed to be fast, and type safe, with an easy syntax. This might help people try it, because they still can fall back on python, and get hooked.

It is insanely fast. Some text munging python script once told me it would take 14 hours. I ported it to Crystal in 40 minutes, and it completed ten minutes later.

I've only looked at it, but that is a good story to convert Python programmers.

To be fair, there are lots of tricks to get stuff moving faster in Python, usually by invoking some module that delegates to native code. This was, IIRC, doing everything in the most straightforward way. But I did port the source code essentially line-by-line and this was within the first week of using Crystal. Any grave (i. e. measurable in O-notation) errors would have just carried over, and no sophistication was involved in my Crystal code.

As other have suggested, this could be a great way to port some of Python's huge ecosystem to Crystal.

Yeah, that's the thought - reduce the friction for converting Python to Crystal. I wouldn't expect many non-trivial programs to work out of the box, but if this tool reduces the time needed to port something, it's served its purpose.