Re:Programming languages and frameworks to learn in 2022
by sundarurfriend on Friday December 31, 2021 @06:49PM
(#29753806)
I was considering Crystal for Advent of Code. But when I checked it out, it seemed a lot of the shards (packages) had last commits in the "2-4 years ago" range. And one of the links in the official website's Community page (https://crystal-lang.org/community) lead to a domain squatter page (crystalshards.xyz), which raised questions of staleness.
It seems to have since been fixed to https://crystalshards.org, which does work, so I guess I just caught it in an unfortunate transitional period. I'll give Crystal a look again, thanks for the recommendation.
(Also, I didn't know about downside 1 (no Windows version) - I guess that partly explains the small community.)
Re:Programming languages and frameworks to learn in 2022
by phillipcarter on Friday December 31, 2021 @06:08PM
(#29753465)
Crystal was fun to learn for Advent of Code, especially as someone who has zero Ruby experience. Felt weird, but in a good way, and ticked off a lot of the boxes I like in languages (decent type inference, static types, good standard library, reasonable toolset, etc.)
The all-important version 1.0 milestone was reached in March 2021. The next version (1.3) is scheduled for release in January 2022.
Some downsides to Crystal:
- No Windows version: Estimate for a Windows version is still not known - this will obviously turn away Windows developers. Crystal can be run via WSL (Windows Sub-system for Linux), but it's not ideal.
- Slow(ish) compilation.
- Small community: This isn't necessarily a problem, but as a new language you won't find the same learning resources and online discussions as more popular languages. However, the standard library is quite well fleshed out.
https://crystal-lang.org/