Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby w/ Tom Richards

Talk description:
Crystal is a new, elegant, multi-paradigm programming language that is productive and fast. It has a Ruby-inspired syntax and compiles to efficient native code via LLVM. Crystal’s advanced type inference and metaprogramming capabilities help avoid unnecessary boilerplate code.

In this talk, Tom walks through a tiny bit of Crystal’s history, a good chunk of Crystal’s features, and a small taste of Crystal’s future.

Keep an eye out for Crystal v1.0 later this year!

Bio:
Tom is a security researcher, software developer, and Linux enthusiast. Tom works for Delegator, a digital marketing agency here in Chattanooga.

[t-richards]

I answered at least one question incorrectly: For the question near 25:00 asking about multiple assignments of a different data type, the Crystal compiler will not produce an error, and the type of the last expression will win. For example:

a = "123" # a : String
a = 5 # a : Int32

typeof(a) # Int32 : Class
a.is_a?(Int32) # true

[kcvinu]

Pls release the windows compiler. Can't wait to code in Crystal. :)

[lankymoose]

"Ruby couldn't be shown here, because it's probably still running" 🤣

[MrAverageViewer]

Hi! What's the status on Crystal in 2019? So far, only ONE tutorial book on Amazon, and ZERO tutorials on Udemy. Is it even picking up adoption from major industry players, or just programming nerds?

[brettknoss]

It looks a lot like Julia. Is it garbage gollected or borrower like Rust?

[himselfe]

The question I really wanted someone to ask was "How's life after Initech, do you still keep up with Peter and Samir?"

[laalbujhakkar]

Oh where are they now! Every year we get challengers to the Mighty C, and every year they bite the dust!

[tmbarral]

funny. So we had Brad Cox who thought C should be object oriented (the right way, not the C++ way) so Objective C was invented. Then you had Matz, who loved ObjC, so he wrote an interpreter named Ruby. Then you have Tom who took Ruby and kinda compiled it.
Back to the roots.

[paulobreim]

Crystal is a bad name for this language. Better to change because when people ear Crystal think in Crystal reports, incuding Google.

[johnjonjhonjonathanjohnson]

why would anyone want their language associated with ruby