Crystal

[Jordan Miner]

On Sunday, 17 February 2013 at 06:28:09 UTC, Ary Borenszweig 
wrote:
> Hello everyone :-)
>
> I follow this newsgroup from time to time. I like D templates. 
> I like the auto keyword. I like auto in templates. I love 
> efficiency and expressiveness.
>
> I believe in smart compilers.
>
> (you might remember me: I'm the author of Descent)
>
> I *really* like D, because it cares about one thing I care 
> about: *performance*. Let's save this world's energy. Let's 
> make a better world. Let's make users' life more enjoyable. 
> Let's be happy :-)
>
> But... do we really have to specify const pure safe nothrow and 
> whatnot? Can't the compiler be smarter? I'm sure there must be 
> a better way. Most new programming languages look like older 
> ones. Newness comes slowly...
>
> One time I asked in this newsgroup if it was possible to have 
> an "auto" keyword for function/method arguments. And... why not 
> make all functions/methods be templates on the type of its 
> arguments?
>
> I think nobody liked this idea. I said "Ruby is like this: you 
> never specify types in method definitions".
>
> "But Ruby is not efficient". "Ruby is a dynamic language". "D 
> is compiled, so it's faster". "Don't make the mistake of 
> comparing a dynamic language with a static/systems programming 
> language". This were some of the answers I got.
>
> I started thinking about this idea: a compiled language that 
> looked like a dynamic language. Is it possible?
>
> Today, I'd like you to take a look at what me and my friend 
> Juan have been working on for the last half month or so. It's a 
> new programming language which aims to be efficient, have 
> similar syntax to Ruby, and where you never have to specify 
> types of variables and arguments.
>
> https://github.com/manastech/crystal/wiki/Introduction
>
> I'd also like to ask you:
>
> 1. Do you know whether a similar language exists?
> 2. Do you think it's feasible? Right now we are getting rather 
> high compilation times (say, a minute) if we use lots of 
> generic classes on medium-large programs. We are still trying 
> to think of the best way to improve compilation times while at 
> the same time taking off programmer's burden.
>
> (The compiler is written in Ruby, which is a bit slow, so that 
> might be one reason it is a bit slow on medium-large 
> programs... imagine Ruby might be 10 to 100 times slower than 
> C, so that minute might be reduced to less than a second... we 
> are currently working on bootstrapping the compiler... but if 
> compilation is on an exponential order, well, you know... ... 
> and the compiler is written in Ruby because it'll later (now?) 
> be easier to port to Crystal, which has a very similar syntax)
>
> I ask about feasibility, but right now you can use this 
> language for small to medium programs (except the standard 
> library is still incomplete).
>
> The goal of this programming language it so be as efficient as 
> possible, but probably it won't be as efficient as C in the 
> general case. But... who knows?
>
> We are also thinking about incorporating concurrency features, 
> like the ones present in Erlang and Go.
>
> In short: utopy =o)
>
> I hope at least someone likes this project...
>
> (I hope at least you, Jacob Carlborg, Ruby lover, find it 
> interesting... or maybe you, bearophile?)
>
> Thanks for your comments,
> Ary
>
> P.S.: bin/crystal -e 'a = 0; 10.times { |i| a += i }; puts a' 
> -O3 -ll

I think this project is really interesting. I really like Ruby, 
but I don't use it much because it is very slow. Another problem 
I have with Ruby is that if you, say, rename a method but miss a 
place it is called, you won't get an error until you try 
executing that code at runtime (although I suppose tests should 
catch that). Crystal fixes both of these. Also, I like how you 
can call C functions. And it has macros.

It does make me wish that LLVM supported exceptions on Windows...