crystal

Looks very cool. Always loved Ruby, but went to other languages for reasons of speed and ... well, lack of the crufty parts. But...the fact that it's been bootstrapped means that getting it up and running on Windows will be a bit more of a challenge than if it were written in something that can just be built on Windows (C? Go?). I did find this: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/issues/26 ...but the effort seems to have stalled. Cross-compilation would fix the bootstrapping problem, and is also important for its own sake; for building code that runs on ARM, for instance (for Android, iOS, etc.). Looks like neither Windows support or cross-compilation have any advocates on the core team, which is sad.

In that case, what he missed was AOT optimization :) Many Lisps have had compilation to binaries. But having a binary doesn't imply being faster than an interpreted language. Theoretically, a JIT optimization can end up with faster code than an AOT optimizer can produce, thanks to runtime profiling. In fact, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks, which Crystal is probably not ready to share, but may have conducted: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/blob/master/samples/fan... Edit: this[0] seems to indicate that the optimizations are in the same ballpark as Go and D, which is really impressive. [0]: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

It took about one year. We originally implemented the compiler in Ruby and because of its similarity with Crystal (or the other way around ;-)) porting it to Crystal was pretty easy in the end. There's this tag: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/releases/tag/ruby You can read about the bootstrapping moment here: http://crystal-lang.org/2013/11/14/good-bye-ruby-thursday.ht...