crystal-docker-quickstart VS lucky

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

Lucky is a full-stack framework written in the Crystal programming language. One of the neat benefits of using Lucky with Crystal is the typesafety you get.

https://luckyframework.org/ . Kemal is even faster but it's mostly for APIs. In my opinion it's on par with Actix with much, much better developer experience.

I'd love to see two docs there:

- What's different from Lucky https://luckyframework.org/

- What's different from Amber https://amberframework.org/

> Regarding 1. While this is certainly an issue, it’s an issue for anyone using any framework and a challenge of database-backed web applications everywhere.

No, there are frameworks out there that doesn't allow queries during template rendering. See Lucky for an example, https://luckyframework.org/.

Lucky: https://luckyframework.org/