Crystal 1.8, the upcoming minor release, will support LLVM’s opaque pointers for the first time, allowing the compiler to be built with LLVM 15 or above. Additionally, this update brings a significant improvement to compilation times. Pointers in LLVM To understand the significance of opaque pointers, let’s take a look at a small sample program: # test.cr class Foo def initialize(@x : Int32) end e