Crystal 1.16.0

I love this language but have never found a production use case for it, versus just using something less obscure like Go. It's the Ruby we wish we had in the 10s.

I write a lot of Go. It’s great. CGo is also good. But Crystal is even more easily interoperable with C libs and has a slimmer runtime. It’s also even faster in my real world testing. Down sides vs Go are compiler speed and general ecosystem is much smaller. But I’ve written several things in Crystal in prod and it has been very good.

If you write some script that run for 30 minutes or so then Crystal is a great choice.

before using crystal I mostly used Ruby for scripting, but there were a lot of problems - the program often crashes after running a while due to typo/nil handling, causing a lot of time wasting - it was too slow for my case, which involving with dealing with large amount of data - doing things in parallel (fetching websites, parsing multiple files) is a lot of work, you need to use external gems for the task, and it is not always the way you want it to do

there is a lot of works spent on crystal to make it enjoyable, you almost never need external libraries to do stuffs. the standard library is big and helpful.