I went through a phase about a year ago where I started all my hobby projects in Crystal. It was a pretty fun exercise but I stopped eventually for the following reasons:
- Ultimately, I ran into some bugs with things in the standard library. There's still a lot of warts and a lot of vague error messages. Hopefully this has improved since I last touched it.
- No windows support. Much of my hobbyist time is spent dabbling with gamedev so it always felt like eventually this would be a dealbreaker.
- I found it hard to grasp some of the type grammar. Mixing the looseness of Ruby syntax with strict typing can sometimes result in weird ergonomics.
That said, I think if/when it matures further I plan on going back to it. Macros were really cool and at the end of the day I just really like working in ruby style languages. The community was also super helpful on Discord.
The windows support is a killer, but I think they’ve been working to improve it. 95% of workstations at my office are Windows, so there’s that’s a huge missing market share.
I still say that the initial lack of good windows support by Ruby was a major reason that Python “won”.
- Ultimately, I ran into some bugs with things in the standard library. There's still a lot of warts and a lot of vague error messages. Hopefully this has improved since I last touched it.
- No windows support. Much of my hobbyist time is spent dabbling with gamedev so it always felt like eventually this would be a dealbreaker.
- I found it hard to grasp some of the type grammar. Mixing the looseness of Ruby syntax with strict typing can sometimes result in weird ergonomics.
That said, I think if/when it matures further I plan on going back to it. Macros were really cool and at the end of the day I just really like working in ruby style languages. The community was also super helpful on Discord.