crystal-docker-quickstart VS dumb-jump

Happy Crystal user and code contributor here. (Also created https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart in case you want to try Crystal without installing anything.) In my opinion:

- Slow compile times are still a pain for iteration.

- The REPL / interpreter mode is still rough around the edges.

As far as companies using Crystal:

- We’re using it happily in production at Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/status

- Kagi is using it for their search engine backend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32687071

- Other companies using it list: https://crystal-lang.org/used_in_prod/

This is great Serdar.

As an alternative to Chapter 2 I’ll also share https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart my project template which lets you get a Crystal (currently 1.6.2) dev environment running with just Docker. Good for kicking the tires, which is what I think your audience is probably wanting to do! And then eventually can install a binary package as you suggest.

My side project https://totalrealreturns.com/ is now about 5k lines of Crystal. There are some rough edges: in particular I think it could use a better templating solution (a port of HAML would be ideal!), and there are some failure modes with the Redis connection pool that have required workarounds.

This includes unit tests: the built-in spec framework is great and much like rspec. https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.6/guides/testing.html

I'm now starting to use Crystal for internal backend infrastructure and microservices.

For anyone who wants to kick the tires on Crystal, I built a crystal-docker-quickstart project template: https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart works without having to install anything locally. (Assuming you have docker.) You can have your own, home-built "Hello world" static binary in under a minute:

    git clone https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart.git my_app && cd my_app && ./d_dev

If you'd like to try out Crystal without installing anything locally, I've created a tiny Docker container with a Crystal project template:

https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart

For example, you may do:

    git clone https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart.git my_app

TLDW It describes the dumb-jump emacs package: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump

I use lsp for C++, but for jump to definition I like dumb jump, because it works.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I have also found dumb-jump to work pretty well for Xcode projects, with no configuration.

I don't really have any trouble using Emacs on the "modern" C++ codebases that I'm working on. I've tried lsp-mode and eglot with clangd but found that really all I need is a little bit of elisp to call clang-format, dumb-jump (<https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump>) to jump to definition, and project-compile to build the project and collect warnings/errors into a buffer.

> 2. No language server (apparently it's just impossible due to the way the language works). Tbh, I'd be happy with just "Go to definition" but alas, no-can-do!

Emacs' dumb-jump appears to have some basic support for go to definition: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump/blob/master/dumb-jump...

But out of curiosity, what is the issue from a technical point of view?

For jumping between function definitions I use dumb-jump, which usually just works. I configure dumb-jump to use ag for its searching which makes it work very quickly.

Mark ring may be what you want. If you want to jump around a code base, Dumb Jump is great: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump

dumb-jump: another tool based on ripgrep, this one defines regexes for what definitions look like in a bunch of languages. This gives you a primitive jump-to-def functionality without any setup (except installing ripgrep). The pros and cons are roughly the same as rg.el and deadgrep: you might not jump to exactly the thing you want (if there are multiple choices, you can select the definition you prefer), but it requires no setup and is pretty fast.

I recommend https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump

While I have no idea about tags, I want to say that you may find something as simple as dumb-jump[1] does what you want most of the time.

[1] https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump