Crystal Blog

As a Ruby/Rails dev, the OP makes a good, directionally correct point: "I don’t believe that simply being better than Rails is enough to displace Rails."

However, he's off by a bit. It's going to take another framework to not just be "simply better". This framework will need to be an order of magnitude better to get me to switch from the amazingly productive Rails ecosystem. The framework/language marketplace is crowded and you are going to really need to standout to get any serious adoption to compete. For me, the cost of switching all new development projects to Hanami seems to out-weight the benefits (this also assumes Rails is the correct tool for the job of course, which it often isn't).

That said, a Rails/Hanami/Sinatra framework built on the Crystal language, which looks almost exactly like Ruby but gives you C performance, appears like it might be that order-of-magnitude to 100x game-changer that could get me to switch stacks. [0]

Whether you like him or not, Peter Thiel has some good thoughts when it comes to innovation and I think this argument perfectly encompasses this Rails/Hanami discussion:

"As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market. The clearest way to make…

> [...] I’ve used a number of languages and dabbled in a few frameworks but nothing I’ve used brings me joy like ruby does.

Totally agree, 100%. Ruby isn't "perfect", but it's a pleasure to use. As in, I actually want to use it, not just am "ok" or ambivalent about it. I have my nitpicks about Ruby, about Rails and other things just like anyone, but I second your comment that nothing else has been able to match that sweet spot of great productivity that is a direct result of a fantastic developer experience created through a programming language that just "flows" linguistically so much easier than...well, everything else I've personally ever seen (with Python being an arguable tie there).

My biggest gripes about Ruby and its ecosystem have been the pain in the posterior it is to deploy apps (all those gems, which eventually wind up abandonware and now you've got dependency hell, especially with apps not maintained in 5 years or something) and its relative sluggishness when compared against some other deployable artifacts.

Personally, I think Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/) fixes pretty much all of this, as long as you're willing to cede a few things due to the nature of the beast (compiled vs. interpreted).

And that's not considering the speed improvements Ruby's gained in the last few years (3x3); it's undoubtedly far better now than when I last released an app with Ruby or Rails (circa ~2016, maybe ~2017ish). I'm just so disappointed that everything's "JavaScript…

Here is a list of similar languages that operate on the fringes and work in a similar compiled-yet-readable (somewhat) fashion:

http://nim-lang.org/

http://crystal-lang.org/

http://lbstanza.org/ (posted a few days ago)

Here is the 1 clear and important problem these languages have (which is similar to the marketplace-dilemma for ebay-type businesses):

They lack support from the community because the community would come only if they had a strong set of libraries/packages to do "actual" work OR if they had the financial-muscle of a big company backing it (Go from Google being the prime example) AND they need the community to actually build these frameworks/libraries to make the language popular/usable to more than 40 people.

If any of these languages want to expand beyond "we're an amazing systems-language that you can build: games, web applications, OSes, desktop applications, mobile applications with", they need to focus on a problem-domain and address it.

Here are some examples:

- Elixir - although not explicitly saying it, with the rise of Phoenix, they are clearly targeting web-backends with good performance

- Kotlin - Java is shit, so they are addressing the Android issue with a language that some say is better

I'm not exactly sure what specific problem-domains the 3 languages above are addressing, but ask yourself this:

If you are going to use a systems-language (similar to those above) to build some micro-service or web backend, why use anything over than…

Go is an early entrant into this space, but I think part of the reason it is early is also that it is less ambitious. But to answer the ever-present question on HN about "why would anyone ever use this language?", something modern, almost as easy to use as a scripting language [1], and almost as fast as a compiled language, doesn't actually have a lot of contenders. (Old fogeys... like me!... like to observe that if you drop modern you have some things like Delphi that fit that slot, but they're all pretty much dead now, and Go has good support for concurrency in the modern processor environment.)

In the "you probably can't convince your boss yet" category I'd recommend Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/) and Nim (https://nim-lang.org/).

Given the programming landscape and the general direction of things lately, I also bet there's a couple of serious contenders developing out there that haven't even hit HN yet.

[1]: For at least a broad class of problems. Put Go head-to-head with a problem someone would use NumPy for and Go will go down in flames in the ease-of-use and line count department. However I use Go for a lot of networks servers (not even necessarily Web servers, but network servers) and the line count for these comes out maybe 20% larger than Python, and it doesn't take much developer cognitive energy for those extra lines. I've also used Go for some command-line type apps where the line count is probably 50% over Python, but I also got some significant wins…

Although I mostly agree with you, it's worth noting that static typing only goes so far. When I worked in a large-scale Java codebase, it always seemed like half the code only existed in order to "work around" the type system. (Don't even get me started on Spring, which might as well be a whole additional language on TOP of the actual application code.) I'm perfectly willing to grant that might just be a Java thing, but still, it was a huge and constant frustration.

Because of the above, types really don't seem like "useful docs" to me. I get extremely irritated when a library links to its API documentation and it's all just autogenerated lists of methods which proudly state their parameter and return types but say absolutely nothing about what they do.

That's one major thing I've always appreciated about the Ruby and Javascript ecosystems: because they can't rely on type information, most libraries go out of their way to describe how they work in depth.

I'm willing to grant that I didn't have a ton of experience with Java before moving on to other languages, and so I could very well be wrong... but one thing that definitely worries me about Typescript is the increasing Java-fication of browser languages.

Now, all that being said, I gave Crystal [0] a spin the other day and it's a freaking dream. Ruby, but with types, and compiled to LLVM? YES PLEASE.

0: https://crystal-lang.org/

Our main proxies (that do the majority of the heavy lifting over here) run nginx and use, what, 50MB tops? If even? I throw them on $5/mo VPS instances and they just blast out IO without any problems.

But nginx was carefully written in C over the course of many years, with a general goal of hauling IO and static data around from other systems. Which is all you really need for web pages, in the end. Solved one thing and holy crap they did it well.

It's the business logic side of the web development world where things get nasty. The tradeoff is you get a giant chest of libraries for solving any stupid problem you want. I didn't have to for example figure out how to do IDN encoding for domain validation. You throw enough of that crap together in a single process and things start to get nasty. But how long would I have spent carefully writing all of it in C? Let's just say I'd be out looking for another job.

Worth the tradeoff, IMHO, but I think with projects like Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org) in the future we will discover we can get pretty close to both in the end. That combined with Moore's law and I think we'll be good to go.

Assuming, of course, that cloud providers don't artificially restrict available RAM through economic constraint (know the true costs - demand better!).