WUwulfklaue·Dec 28, 2017Submission
87 points · Open discussioncrystal-lang
crystal
Crystal2013–2026
crystal-lang / crystal
crystal
The Crystal Programming Language
97Distinct people
138Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
20.5KGitHub stars
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What it is
The Crystal Programming Language
GitHub
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Also in these discussions
- kostya/benchmarks · linked in 2 of the same 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, 10:56:20 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.
* 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
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 3 | 13 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 23 | 5 | 18 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 0 | 21 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 3 | 14 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 2 | 12 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
23 sourcesCrystal production users: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-in-product...
In This is not a new year’s resolutionHave you seen https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/3582 ?
In Overview of the Crystal languageCrystal seems like a great high-level language and alternative to Ruby, but the biggest blocker for me using it more generally is the lack of multi-threading support. There is WIP support for threading but it has not been committed. Moreover the Crystal developers either don't do a great job of updating their multi-threading roadmap [0] or work on multi-threading has died off. (I assume it is the latter because the thread-support branch has not gotten any commits in 10 months [1].) Ultimately if I wanted the high-level aspects of Ruby or Python and wanted more performance and great thread support I'd probably go with Elixir (even taking into consideration BEAM weirdness).
[0] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Threads-support
[1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/tree/thread-support
In Overview of the Crystal languageWindows support is still WIP, recently we are making some good progress https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/5339
In Overview of the Crystal languageCrystal is a Ruby inspired compiled language, allowing it to run blazingly fast with a very low memory footprint. It uses LLVM for emitting native code, thus making use of all the optimisations built into the toolchain.
Website: https://crystal-lang.org/
Github: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal
In Overview of the Crystal languageWe have a dedicated wiki page for Crystal production users :)
https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Used-in-product...
In Overview of the Crystal languageShould Crytal consider Immix GC?
2 points · Open discussionSee https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crystal-lang/xG5MQXT... and https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/4864 Crystal is improving everyday :)
In Crystal in Production: DiploidThe actual memory usage is coming from the number of instantiated methods. If you write a method, it gets an entirely new implementation of it copied and compiled for every different list of argument types. For example,
def foo(bar)
bar + bar
end
bar1 : Int32
foo(bar1)
bar2 : String
foo(bar1)
bar2 : Int32 | String
foo(bar1)
The above code gives you three methods to generate code for: foo(Int32), foo(String), foo(Int32 | String).
This isn't really a problem for small projects, but with large projects (60k+ loc), you end up with some methods such as puts, Array(T)#<<, etc with thousands of instantiations.
We have some edge-case semantics (we don't cast arguments to their restriction types, which we plan to remove before 1.0) which also prevent us from allowing only instantiating foo(Int3
Read the rest
2 | String) when we change the definition to `def foo(bar : Int32 | String)`. Hopefully in the future, we can allow the compiler to take advantage of method argument type restrictions to reduce the number of instantiated methods and speed up the compiler.
That doesn't mean the compiler will be super slow if you don't annotate your methods, it just means that the stdlib and shards' public API will start annotating it's method arguments more (which gives you better docs and error messages anyway).
For more info: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/4864
Even though it's experimental I've successfully compiled Kemal with multi-thread support. The throughput was OK. It's promising and will definitely help CPU bound apps :)
You can check the wiki for more info https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Threads-support
In Crystal in Production: DiploidAgain Crystal is not Ruby. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/4731#issuecom...
> we might never get static typing for Ruby anytime soon
Yes we will not get type declarations as a part of Ruby syntax anytime soon, but this doesn't mean we can not have static type checking right now
In Show HN: Ruby static type checker – proof of conceptCrystal is not Ruby. Please do not advertise it as a drop in replacement. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/4731#issuecom...
Imagine you have a big ruby project in production and you want to add static type checking. You won't be able to use Crystal for it, while the idea behind Diamondback Ruby is to be able to integrate it gradually.
In Show HN: Ruby static type checker – proof of conceptI believe this is partially due to the lack of incremental compilation, which is on the roadmap [0] for 1.0. The compiler itself builds in ~10 seconds. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/wiki/Roadmap
[1]: https://crystal-lang.org/2015/12/24/the-future-of-crystal.ht...
In Goby: A new Ruby-inspired language written in GoTwo things:
1. We need to get windows support to cover the entirety of the standard library (when it's possible of course). This will also allow us to cross-compile the Crystal compiler onto Windows, which bootstraps the whole Windows port and makes it truly usable.
2. We then need to merge that windows support into the standard library. We have already identified the abstractions required to make sure we can isolate the platform-specific parts of the standard library and have started moving some platform specific code there (see [1]). It's early days but this work should continue and will allow us to slowly merge windows support as a series of small and reviewable PRs, instead of one massive unreviewable chunk.
The first part of windows support is already merged and in the latest release here [2].
[1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/cry
In How to build video games for Windows using CrystalShowing the 15 most recent of 23 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.