Crystal 1.22.0 - Hackdot

Re:Crystal 1.22.0 by ch4s3 on Thursday October 22, 2026 @02:05PM (#50198967)

It is a lot easier, but I've been working on this language project for almost 8 months now. I've spent a lot of time in research papers and thinking about both dev UX and how it works with LLMs. Knocking together a working compiler on LLVM is WAY easier now, but making something nice is still hard. A language is so much more than a compiler and syntax. So to your point, standing out is incredibly hard.

I'm doing this because it interests me and I'm learning, but it does feel quixotic at times.

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Re:Crystal 1.22.0 by abc42 on Saturday October 24, 2026 @03:09AM (#50218932)

Cool. I'm about 3-4 months in, this is the current result: https://hanki-lang.org/docs/reference/ -- sorry about the LLM smell. I haven't paid much attention to making the documentation beautiful yet.

Seems like you're slightly more ambitious with the features (linear typing, refinement typing are way beyond what I dream about). I'm focusing more on a small practical application language with ruby-like aesthetics.

I wanted Hanki to be a general-purpose language that could be used with minimal compromises as a scripting language, a configuration language and a reasonably high-performing application / server-side language. I wanted a good REPL, arbitrary precision arithmetics by default, reasonable safety features (effects, strong typing, concurrency via message-passing actors, erlang-like supervising) and excellent readability for human reviewing.

I wanted to include features that force AI agents into a style, so the linter is included as part of the checker and every linter complaint is an error.

The implementation is currently 300K+ lines of Rust, about 60Kloc of Hanki.

I still have about a hundred beads tickets to go through before I'm happy enough about this that I dare to publish it. And seems like every solved task gets 2 follow-ups :)

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Re:Crystal 1.22.0 by ch4s3 on Monday October 26, 2026 @11:38AM (#50245586)

That's a cool project! It's fascinating that we both landed on efect-y capabilities with a faile closed system `hanki run --deny io` in hanki and `forge cap inspect ./build/myapp --deny IO.Network`[1] for binary audits in March. In general though March requires a compiled program to declare it's needs and errors on undeclared IO, etc.[2]

This is super interesting, I really like it. Actor concurrency with effects is not as broadly implemented as it should be.

[1] https://march-lang.org/docs/capability-audit/#auditing-a-com...

[2] https://march-lang.org/docs/capabilities/#io-permission-caps

Is your source code online? I can't find it.

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