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Ya, apparently it's been around longer than I thought. They have a blog entry [1] announcing the bootstrapping in November of 2013.

[1] http://crystal-lang.org/2013/11/14/good-bye-ruby-thursday.ht...

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So is it like RPython...Crystal programs running on Crystal convert other Crystals programs into C to build an interpreter that is then used to run yet other Crystal programs (the ones users write)?

I think it goes to LLVM IR rather than C. It does it's own type inference, so compiling to C after that would preclude many optimizations that it could take advantage of.

Ah the penny drops:

"Crystal is not interpreted. It doesn’t have a virtual machine. The code is compiled to native machine code by using LLVM."

http://crystal-lang.org/2013/09/04/happy-birthday-crystal.ht...

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