This is a guest post by Mark Siemers, who kindly volunteered to suggest a series of Crystal blog posts. Expect more to come, or - even better - contact us about writing your own post. 1. Extremely low learning curve Think of some languages that have become popular in the last 5-10 years. What comes to mind? Elixir, Go, Rust perhaps? They all have performance advantages over Ruby but are more diffi

Crystal has gone a long way since we started it over five years ago. What was once an experiment to see if it was possible to have a compiled yet Ruby-like language, is now a trending language with over 7,000 github stargazers and almost 1,400 shards. Its popularity has risen considerably in the last few years, and we are incredibly proud to see something we have built resonating so much with the

Note: this was an April’s Fool post. However, with Crystal macros you could do this. We Crystal developers believe compilers should be smart. You don’t need to add type annotations everywhere: only when needed, or when you want them. Can we make the compiler even smarter? This past month we have been thinking that since Crystal is a relatively young language with a still incomplete standard librar

Crystal 0.5.6 has been released! The most important feature of this release is the incluson of a prelimiary doc command that generates automatic documentation. Now you can browse the API docs for the standard library. We will polish and improve the style with time, but at least it has lots of small nice features: Documentation must be written using Markdown, which is pretty popular and easy to rea

Batteries includedCrystal’s standard library comes with a whole range of libraries that let you start working on your project right away. Check the API docs # 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 address = server.bind_tcp(8080) puts "L