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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. Kotlin is heavily oriented towards Java familiarity and interoperability, Crystal is heavily oriented towards Ruby familiarity, and C interoperability.

Also, Crystal was first released in 2014, when Kotlin was like 3 years old, and 100% JVM-bound.

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Kotlin mostly requires JVM, Crystal does not. With Kotlin native, Kotlin js and most importantly Graal native this is plain wrong.

This is correct today.

This was not the case when Crystal development started.

Translation: Crystal had a value proposition but now it's gone, before the product launch.

Reality: Kotlin's value proposition is android development.

It's a misconception, Kotlin is suitable everywhere that Java is suitable, and even more.

That is like a hack. You are basically dumping a JIT image to file. That means all sorts of caveats apply such as be real careful about how you use reflection.

Also there is no ABI so you cannot use anything like a native DLL.

Native compilation while possible is clearly second class on the JVM platform. For Crystal it is first class.

Crystal is also not great for dlls or .so files as the event loop and gc probably wouldn't work well in that scenario.

I have used Crystal to make DLLs and it worked plenty fine.

Sounds like a fair compromise when the alternatives includes at least one of the following tradeoffs: harder, less safe, and/or slower.

> Also there is no ABI so you cannot use anything like a native DLL.

Pretty sure this isn't the case with Kotlin Native[1].

[1] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/native-dynamic-libraries.html

Is kotlin/native a first class option today for server side programming? Last I looked at it, which was fairly recently, that did not seem to be the case.

While Kotlin native is likely more mature than crystal I would say that graal native is much better as it allow you to reuse Java libraries and therefore spring native.

That doesn't stop 99% of the mind share and language design from being "Java with lipstick".

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