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Comment by lowwave | Hacker News Reader

why not just use Crystal https://crystal-lang.org, it is faster than go, with Ruby like sytnax.

One major selling point of Ruby is the robust ecosystem of high quality, open source libraries which are relevant to the things SaaS companies need to get done. There's a ton of code you just don't have to write if you stick to Ruby.

The fact that "Ruby developers already basically know the Crystal syntax" is a selling point for Crystal, but if people are already evaluating a switch to another programming language, that's just one of many factors that must be considered.

> with Ruby like sytnax

People use Ruby because they like the way it works, not because of the syntax.

Crystal's standard library is also a close match for Ruby's. I do Ruby every day and was able to familiarise myself with Crystal in a few hours.

It's definitely lacking in the web ecosystem department but the language is a joy to use and incredibly fast.

It can be a 99.99% close-match, but if it doesn't include key methods like a runtime method_missing, then it's hard to see how we'd reimplement Rails and our code base on top of it.

I think people focus on the superficial similarity of Crystal, without thinking what semantics need to be the same for it to use usefully similar. And those semantics aren't there, so it doesn't matter if it sorts of looks the same and includes most methods.

I feel like if it was tractable to run Rails on Crystal then someone would have done that.

I'm waiting until I hear some success people are having with it. I suspect the ecosystem is young and library support is minimal too.

Last I heard (which was years ago) it was pretty much a solo project.

That said, the demo is really something and I like what they're doing. I hope one day it becomes my language of choice.

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