I feel like this is a bit strongly influenced by the macro experience. Macros are an advanced and powerful feature and naturally more complex to debug. In general, Crystal's error messages are often praised for their clarity and helpfulness (especially compared to dynamically typed languages, of course).
> 4. Weak HTTP server implementation -- making things such as a fetching POST params or uploads incredibly frustrating. Once read the request body cannot be read again.
The stdlib implementation of `HTTP::Server` is intentionally very bare-bones (many programming languages don't even have such a practically usable feature in stdlib). Specialized web server implementations are available as shards (https://shardbox.org/categories/Web_Frameworks). They're based on the foundation in stdlib and provide more advanced features.
> 5. Weak/non-existent Windows support
Windows support is pretty stable and almost complete by now.
> 6. No multicore support
Crystal has supported multi-threading as opt-in via the `-Dpreview_mt` flag. It's considered a preview, because it's to be used with care when dealing with data structures that are not thread-safe. But it has proven to work well in production use.
> 8. Nil handling takes a bit getting used to (coming from Ruby)
But once you're used to it, it's sooo much helpful. It just helps to avoid a lot of potential bugs which you would have to take extra care for in Ruby.
This isn't really a genuine statement. Currently Crystal Requires a full installation of Visual Studio on Windows:
But after the executable binary is compiled then it can run without any dependencies. I think the later is more important for a window program.
I gave the exes to my users and none of them had any problem running it.
For development currently WSL is still the best way to run crystal in windows.
WSL is never the best way to do anything, unless the question is "what is the best way to emulate Linux on Windows?". In all other cases, WSL is literally the worst way to do anything.
> run `scoop install vs_2022_cpp_build_tools`
(from the "required libraries" link in https://crystal-lang.org/install/on_windows/)
https://github.com/neatorobito/scoop-crystal/blob/main/bucke...
no thank you.
Alternatives: if you don't mind your eyes bleeding with C++-verbosity and tracking liveness yourself, there's Rust. Sure Go looks cute until you have a million users emailing you trivial questions they should've asked a group.
And if you want something similar to Crystal but with even stricter and more granular semantics than Rust with an even smaller community. there's Pony. It was built around the Orca GC. There's Nim too. Finally, one can use Haskell to built that critical payment service and maintain absolute job security. Meanwhile, the Erlang/Elixir OTP stack stays performant, although no one is quite sure how to package, deploy, and manage its lifecycle properly.
Emacs' dumb-jump appears to have some basic support for go to definition: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump/blob/master/dumb-jump...
But out of curiosity, what is the issue from a technical point of view?
This applies to the responsiveness and memory consumption of the language server as well as the regular compilation process. So this is an important topic, and we're working on improvements. It's a complex topic, but there are some ideas.
What most LSPs do is approximate it rather than worry about perfection and deliver nothing.
1. Too slow to compile (the whole program + the entire stdlib is built everytime you build!). No incremental compilation available.
2. No language server (apparently it's just impossible due to the way the language works). Tbh, I'd be happy with just "Go to definition" but alas, no-can-do!
3. Obscure error messages (macros are to blame here)
4. Weak HTTP server implementation -- making things such as a fetching POST params or uploads incredibly frustrating. Once read the request body cannot be read again.
5. Weak/non-existent Windows support
6. No multicore support
7. Obviously small community
8. Nil handling takes a bit getting used to (coming from Ruby)
9. Error messages are hard to read with overloaded methods wherein just the types are used without any indication of what doesn't match
Overall, if the above changes, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat!