Crystal (programming Language)

Crystal is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language, designed and developed by Ary Borenszweig, Juan Wajnerman, Brian Cardiff and more than 400 contributors. With syntax inspired by the language Ruby, it is a compiled language with static type-checking, but specifying the types of variables or method arguments is generally unneeded. Types are resolved by an advanced global type inference algorithm. Crystal
is currently in active development. It is released as free and open-source software under the Apache License version 2.0.

History

Work on the language began in June 2011, with the aim of merging the elegance and productivity of Ruby with the speed, efficiency, and type safety of a compiled language. Initially named ''Joy'', it was quickly renamed to ''Crystal''.

The Crystal compiler was first written in Ruby, but later rewritten in Crystal, thus becoming self-hosting, . The first official version was released in June 2014. In July 2016, Crystal joined the TIOBE index.

Description

Although resembling the Ruby language in syntax, Crystal compiles to much more efficient native code using an LLVM backend, at the cost of precluding the dynamic aspects of Ruby. The advanced global type inference used by the Crystal compiler, combined with union types, gives it more the feel of a higher-level scripting language than many other comparable programming languages. It has automated garbage collection and offers a Boehm collector. Crystal possesses a macro system and supports generics as well as method and operator overloading. Its concurrency model is inspired by communicating sequential processes (CSP) and implements lightweight fibers and channels (for interfiber communication), inspired by Go.

Examples

Hello World

This is the simplest way to write the Hello World program in Crystal:

puts "Hello World!"

The same as in Ruby.

Or using an object-oriented programming style:

class Greeter
def initialize(@name : String)
end

def salute
puts "Hello #!"
end
end

g = Greeter.new("world")
g.salute

HTTP server

require "http/server"

server = HTTP::Server.new do , context,
context.response.content_type = "text/plain"
context.response.print "Hello world! The time is #"
end

server.bind_tcp("0.0.0.0", 8080)
puts "Listening on http://0.0.0.0:8080"
server.listen

TCP echo server

require "socket"

def handle_client(client)
message = client.gets
client.puts message
end

server = TCPServer.new("localhost", 1234)
while client = server.accept?
spawn handle_client(client)
end

Type inference and union types

The following code defines an array containing different types with no usable common ancestor. Crystal automatically creates a union type out of the types of the individual items.

desired_things = unicorns, "butterflies", 1_000_000p typeof(desired_things.first) # typeof returns the compile time type, here (Symbol , String , Int32)
p desired_things.first.class # the class method returns the runtime type, here Symbol

Concurrency

Channels can be used to communicate between fibers, which are initiated using the keyword spawn.

channel = Channel(Int32).new

spawn do
puts "Before first send"
channel.send(1)
puts "Before second send"
channel.send(2)
end

puts "Before first receive"
value = channel.receive
puts value # => 1

puts "Before second receive"
value = channel.receive
puts value # => 2

Adoption

In 2020, it was reported that the infotainment units in vehicles produced by Nikola Corporation were written in Crystal. Much of the backend of the Kagi search engine is written with Crystal.

Further reading

*
*
*

References

External links

*

Documentation
* {{Github, crystal-lang

/r/crystal_programming subreddit

Crystal Announcements

Programming languages
Multi-paradigm programming languages
Object-oriented programming languages
Concurrent programming languages
Statically typed programming languages
Cross-platform free software
Cross-platform software
Free and open source compilers
Software using the Apache license
Programming languages created in 2014
2014 software