From Ruby to Crystal: A Quick Look

Crystal could be a really powerful tool for enhancing existing Ruby code.<p>Imagine a world where you write your code in Ruby, but farm out the expensive operations to a Ruby-like Crystal extension (similar to what is commonly done with C or Rust). I think this is possible already (just after a quick Google search[1]), just not friendly for the average Ruby dev to implement.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;AnnaKazakova&#x2F;how-to-write-ruby-extensions-with-crystal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;AnnaKazakova&#x2F;how-to-write-ruby-ex...</a>

Outside of speed benefits as compared to ruby, one of the main things going for crystal is it&#x27;s ability to use all of the robust tooling that already exists. This post mentions it in passing but Crystal gets the benefit of all the existing tooling without having to build it as part of delivering the language to developers. I think that&#x27;s a huge win. I also think this is one reason why Crystal has grown fairly quickly. This could largely but due to the fact that it&#x27;s built upon LLVM. Regardless, the community and documentation is pretty awesome. I can&#x27;t wait to see what happens for the 1.0 release.

Great writeup for the folks who are curious but lack the time to test Crystal.

My biggest takeaway from reading this is that Crystal is <i>much</i> more divergent from Ruby than I expected.

70x faster? If Crystal gets its own port of Ruby on Rails, oh boy.