The Crystal Programming Language

I recently came across a Hacker News thread on the Crystal programming language that piqued my interest. Reading around, it seems to hit many of the language features I’m interested in.

From what I can gather, Crystal is an imperative, compiled, and statically-typed language with a syntax heavily influenced by Ruby. Types can often be inferred by the compiler resulting in a syntax more similar to dynamic languages while static typing leads to more efficient compiled code.

Here’s a sample webserver from their documentation page:

# A very basic HTTP server
require "http/server"
 
server = HTTP::Server.new do |context|
  context.response.content_type = "text/plain"
  context.response.print "Hello world, got #{context.request.path}!"
end
 
puts "Listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080"
server.listen(8080)

This syntax looks very clean to me. It’s just different enough to Python to be interesting but not so much that I couldn’t quickly be productive.

Maybe I’ll try it out on one or two Advent of Code puzzles this year.

Thanks for reading, please enjoy this recording of a Beethoven late string quartet (No. 12, Op. 127) by the LeSalle Quartet.

This work by Alex C. Viana is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4