We created the Crystal language, ask us anything!

Matías García Isaía — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 17:23:20 +0000

Hi there!

I'm Matias Garcia Isaia, and together with Brian Cardiff and Martin Verzilli, we're part of the Crystal Team working at Manas.Tech.

Manas.Tech is a software company from Buenos Aires, Argentina, that develops unconventional tech projects for people around the world. And, after being involved in Crystal's development for a while, I can assure you there are not that many conventional things in developing a programming language!

Crystal is a programming language that aims to be friendly for both humans and computers alike - make developers enjoy writing code, and make code run as efficiently as it can. Statically typed, compiled language with a really heavy type inference to make it feel as scripting - the best of both worlds. And did I say it's open source?

Its first commit has just turned 5, and it has changed from an individual's hobby back then into an amazing language supported by Manas.Tech and an amazing community. To celebrate that, we are doing this AMA. Starting today, at 2PM EST, we'll do our best to share with you everything we know about the project, life, the universe, and everything!

So - don't be shy, ask us anything!

Hello World

Matías García Isaía — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost was originally posted by @asterite and @waj on the official Crystal Blog

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

puts "Hello World"

But if you feel like it, you can also use some object oriented programming:

class Greeter
  def initialize(@name : String )
  end

  def salute
    puts "Hello #{@name}!"
  end
end

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

Or maybe with blocks:

"Hello world".each_char do |char|
  print char
end
print '\n'

Each alternative might have a different performance, but luckily all of them are pretty expressive.

Ok, but what's the purpose of learning a language if we cannot run the damn thing? Let's see how we do this with Crystal (and let's assume you already have it installed).

First create a file hello.cr containing your preferred choice of the previous examples.
Then type in the console:

$ bin/crystal hello.cr
$ ./hello
Hello World
$

The compiled output is a standalone executable without any specific runtime dependency. Neat! Isn't it?

DEV Community: Matías García Isaía

We created the Crystal language, ask us anything!

Hello World