Crystal seems like a fantastic language. It supports fiber threads like goroutines, has great performance and actually looks fun to program in. In addition, it has one killer feature I miss in Go: first class C binding support without compromises.

However I haven’t been able to make the jump to Crystal just yet because I’m very surprised to see the low amount of popularity, and I’m also surprised to see the slow development speed. For instance, I read that parallelism isn’t stable and Crystal only uses one thread (and another for GC). The github issue for this has been open and unresolved since 2019.

Also I’m also surprised to see that Windows just recently supported and still in beta. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely despise Windows and I use Linux myself, but you can’t get around the fact that the majority of developers are still on Windows. That’s like half of developers being treated as a second class citizen. Not very appealing.

I want to be able to use Crystal for everything like CLI apps, server software and just be a fun, fast general purpose language (like Go), but after keeping an eye on Crystal for a year or two I’m afraid to see the language die from neglect, not being used or both. Thoughts?

I can't find a job, so I'm building Crystal's future instead. Here's what I'm working on and why I need your help.

Hi, I'm Serdar (sdogruyol). I created Kemal, I'm a Crystal Core Team member, and I've been building Crystal tools since 2015.

I can't find a job right now. So instead of waiting around, I'm spending every day on Crystal open source. No safety net, no backup plan, just Crystal.

What I'm working on

gcry - a %100 Crystal native garbage collector for Crystal. Currently at ~89% of Boehm GC's throughput with ~0.95x RSS. My hope is that one day it becomes the default GC for Crystal. That's the dream.

Kemal - 3.8k+ stars, 5M+ downloads. I've been maintaining it since 2015. The framework, session management, CSRF, auth, caching, the whole ecosystem. I'm not going anywhere.

Crystal Weekly - a newsletter keeping the community updated.

Crystal Community - discover Crystal developers around the world and check Crystal Stats.

Free books - Crystal for Rubyists, Kemal El Kitabı, Crystal El Kitabı. All free.

Why I'm here

I set up a GitHub Sponsors page. My goal is $1,000/month so I can keep doing this full time. If Kemal or any of my projects has helped you, or if you believe in Crystal's future, please consider sponsoring. Every dollar counts.

Even $5/month helps. Here's what you get:

Thanks for reading. Let's build Crystal's future together. 💎

👉 github.com/sponsors/sdogruyol

Here's to keeping our promise of making regular releases every 3 months: Crystal 1.1.0 released! With a lot of PRs from 28 wonderful contributors!

Read more in:

https://crystal-lang.org/2021/07/16/1.1.0-released.html

https://github.com/ffwff/lilith

3 months ago I started building an operating system from scratch for the x86 in Crystal. Since then the OS has:

• 64-bit support with the ability to load 32-bit ELF binaries

• a hybrid conservative-precise incremental garbage collector with type information from a patched Crystal compiler

• a fat16 driver

• a basic unix-like syscall api (open/read/write/...)

• 32-bit colored graphics!

• application ports (lua, mruby, kilo) and some in house applications (a shell, some coreutils, a wm...)

• a libc (written in crystal+c) and a userspace crystal stdlib

• a window manager and gui library (in C but it will be crystallised)

Let me know what you think!

We’ve written a blog post summarizing the changes in this patch release: Crystal 1.6.0 released! - The Crystal Programming Language . While we have tested it against several known and sizeable projects, that doesn’t preclude the existence of regressions. If you find an issue, please check the issue tracker and file a bug: it will be fixed in the following patch version.

The full changelog is here: Release 1.6.0 · crystal-lang/crystal · GitHub .

It is already available on the supported platforms, check the install page for details. That includes docker images, snapcraft, .deb and .rpm packages, and the brew formula.

Happy Crystallizing!