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crystal-lang
crystal
Crystal2013–2026
crystal-lang / crystal

crystal

The Crystal Programming Language

Languages & Compilers
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97Distinct people
138Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
20.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Crystal Programming Language

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year138 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-03-13 08:16:16 UTC to 2026-04-16 20:50:06 UTC.

05101520252013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 3 submissions, 13 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 23 mentions; 5 submissions, 18 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 0 submissions, 21 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 3 submissions, 14 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 2 submissions, 12 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16313
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC23518
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21021
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17314
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14212
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

16 sources
RX14·Dec 19, 2016
> language primitives easily producing efficient primitives of the machine I think crystal already does this well, especially in release mode when llvm gets to optimise the program as a whole. This also seems like something that can be improved without any breaking changes, which is nice. > the cost (esp time/memory) of language primitives must be intuitive (ideally deterministic) I'm less sure of this, maybe having dynamic dispatch would be an issue here? I think that release optimisations would make the performance of any code pretty variable depending on what optimisations are applied. Asterite probably knows more about this than me. > be able to size/manipulate variables at the bit level Crystal supports bitwise operators for doing bit twiddling, and obviously llvm optimises that very well. As for sizing values at the bit level, unfor
Read the rest
tunately only the standard Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64 and their unsigned varieties are available for integers in crystal. There also isn't a great deal of fine control over padding and placement in structs, apart from padding on/off. This could probably be easily improved. > support pointers Crystal supports both pass-by-reference and pass-by-value structures (class and struct), and all pointer operations available in C should be easily doable in Crystal. > have anywhere from tiny to no runtime Crystal has quite a big runtime by default, but fortunately it's really easy to turn it off and import only the bits you want using --prelude=empty, which imports only the bare minimum [0]. You could then build your own standard library built without a GC, or implement a GC module (for example [1] which just uses malloc) which would allow you to reuse String, Array, hash, etc. > a good C FFI https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/c_binding... > support inline assembly Crystal has this too, used here: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/fibe... although this too could be improved. Overall I think Crystal has promise, and could be used for embedded programming without too much hassle, although its not a high priority of the core team. I know someone built a small kernel which just outputted "hello world" on x86 qemu. [0] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/empt... [1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/gc/n...
In The Crystal Programming Language
catnaroek·Aug 4, 2016
> (0) It does not. It has a GC, and all features you'll likely use are memory-safe. Nice. > (1) Not at all, look at the source implementation of their language implementation. For example, the lexer: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/comp.... Seems pretty clear to me. How am I supposed to learn the language's semantics from a lexer? > (2) Not entirely sure what you mean since that is such a broad case, but as stated, Crystal stdlib is mostly safe. Consider this use case: I spawn five fibers. Can I send the same mutable object to all five? If so, can they attempt to mutate the object without properly taking turns? (e.g., using a mutex)
In Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby
Svenskunganka·Aug 4, 2016
(0) It does not. It has a GC, and all features you'll likely use are memory-safe. You can of course use unsafe methods and raw pointers, but those are documented that they are unsafe and are usually only used for writing bindings to a C library. Macros for example are evaluated and constructed at compile-time, so no undefined behaviour can come from those. Most methods have different behaviour. For example, one method may throw an exception, another return an error, and another simply return Nil. You know if you are using `hello!` `hello?` or `hello`, so no undefined behaviour there. (1) Not at all, look at the source implementation of their language implementation. For example, the lexer: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/comp... Seems pretty clear to me. (2) Not entirely sure what you mean since that is such a broa
Read the rest
d case, but as stated, Crystal stdlib is mostly safe.
In Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

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