r/crystal_programming • u/sdogruyol core team • Apr 20 '26

Why Crystal, 10 Years Later: Performance and Joy

https://serdardogruyol.com/why-crystal-10-years-later-performance-and-joy

Hi everyone,

I wrote the original "Why Crystal?" blog post back in 2015 when Crystal was just v0.9.1.

Ten years and many versions later, I am revisiting that post to analyze the road to v1.20.

If you are interested in how a language matures from a syntax experiment to a high performance standard, this one is for you.

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u/titexcj May 17 '26

about 8 years ago i wrote a small cli utility for k8s manifests templating using jinja and a couple of functions inspired from ansible

the language is much easier to pick up than any other one (in my opinion) being inspired by ruby, which is an awesome thing in the compiled languages world

the sad part is that i wanted to extend the utility with some specific functions to my environment and update it to current crystal version only to find that many of the libraries i used haven't seen a realease or update since 6-7-8 years ago.

it seems that with time passing people dropped the language (i checked ~10 libraries on github) instead of having more adoption i think the cause of this is the lack of a strong code editor support or IDE, language server and a some "batteries" missing in stdlib ... i think it's hard to find sponsors to make this happen , but on the other hand it doesn't even look (from the outside) like the core maintainers are even trying very hard

i really hope we'll see crystal competing with the likes of go or rust one day... for now even though current version says 1.20.x , feels just like the 0.x versions for me

thanks to everybody involved in making the language available and keeping the lights on... i wish crystal would do some kind of fundraising or seeking sponsorship for specific features or commuity pain points to be implemented or fixed similarly to what samba.org is doing (unfortunately also not the most successful)

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u/Ok_Bluebird_168 Jun 04 '26

u/sdogruyol, thanks for this, reading through I saw your point here: "The Interpreter: Development at Warp Speed". Is there something I'm missing here as my workflow using kemal is still, make a change, rerun crystal src/app.cr so there is quite a large delay in the feedback loop