Crystal is less developed, as a language and ecosystem, compared to Elixir. Crystal is still yet to reach v1, which is likely to happen this year and hopefully cause an explosion in the ecosystem too.
They are both compiled, though Elixir is to the BEAM VM and Crystal to native code using LLVM.
Elixir is a much more functional language whereas Crystal is very similar to Ruby's idea that everything is an object.
Both languages have concurrency built in, but Crystal can't yet run code in parallel, where Elixir processes can.
I'm not sure how else to compare them, I'm sure there's many ways! I think overall both Crystal and Elixir appeal to Ruby developers. To me, Crystal is much easier to understand straight away, but you can get great benefits, mainly speed, out of both.
First let me say I'm very impressed with the single threaded speed. That's really impressive what you've done!
A few years later - I think something interesting to note is that Crystal usage hasn't taken off, and Elixir has grown substantially. My critique of this is, even thought these examples look like ruby - they are not, you can't reuse all of your Rails code when you port over.
So IMO optimizing for understanding at the beginning is the wrong thing to optimize for. For instance, the fact that elixir is functional is important for concurrency - even though it's easier to understand at the beginning you'll still run into the fact that the VM for Elixir is far more robust and developed than anything out there.
So, I think Crystal is a local optimization, but the VM elixir is built on (maybe not elixir itself) allows languages to be much closer to a global optimization of "the right language"
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Nice. How does Crystal compare to Elixir?
Crystal is less developed, as a language and ecosystem, compared to Elixir. Crystal is still yet to reach v1, which is likely to happen this year and hopefully cause an explosion in the ecosystem too.
They are both compiled, though Elixir is to the BEAM VM and Crystal to native code using LLVM.
Elixir is a much more functional language whereas Crystal is very similar to Ruby's idea that everything is an object.
Both languages have concurrency built in, but Crystal can't yet run code in parallel, where Elixir processes can.
I'm not sure how else to compare them, I'm sure there's many ways! I think overall both Crystal and Elixir appeal to Ruby developers. To me, Crystal is much easier to understand straight away, but you can get great benefits, mainly speed, out of both.
First let me say I'm very impressed with the single threaded speed. That's really impressive what you've done!
A few years later - I think something interesting to note is that Crystal usage hasn't taken off, and Elixir has grown substantially. My critique of this is, even thought these examples look like ruby - they are not, you can't reuse all of your Rails code when you port over.
So IMO optimizing for understanding at the beginning is the wrong thing to optimize for. For instance, the fact that elixir is functional is important for concurrency - even though it's easier to understand at the beginning you'll still run into the fact that the VM for Elixir is far more robust and developed than anything out there.
So, I think Crystal is a local optimization, but the VM elixir is built on (maybe not elixir itself) allows languages to be much closer to a global optimization of "the right language"