http-client VS crystal

Fortran-lang's role (as an open-source org) has been 4-pronged: Tooling (build system and package manager, testing, eventually compilers etc.), modernized and maintained libraries (stdlib, minpack, fftpack, etc.), community space (Discourse), and evangelism/marketing (website, Twitter, blog posts etc.). Some members participate in the standardization process of the language, but the groups and processes are separate and complementary.

It's true that one goal may be to pick an important race and try to win it.

Another goal, in my view more important, is to make Fortran more pleasant to use for people/Orgs who need it (there are many) and for people who love it (there are many).

I've found that more often than not, people/teams first like working with a technology, and then come up with technical arguments for why that technology is the best choice. Often the arguments are valid, sometimes they're made up, but ultimately underneath it all you either like it or not and that's all that matters. My goal with Fortran-lang has been to slowly and continuously increase the surface area of Fortran's likability. Fortran is not for everyone, but for people who think it may be, we can work to make it better and more pleasant to use.

As one example, we just released a small library to make high-level HTTP requests from Fortran applications: https://github.com/fortran-lang/http-client. This was a product of one of our Google Summer of Code contributors.

27. Crystal - $77,104

I like the first code example on https://crystal-lang.org

    # A very basic HTTP server

Obviously as an interpreted language, it's never going to be as fast as something like C, Rust, or Go. Traditionally the ruby maintainers have not designed or optimized for pure speed, but that is changing, and the language is definitely faster these days compared to a decade ago.

If you like the ruby syntax/language but want the speed of a compiled language, it's also worth checking out Crystal[^1]. It's mostly ruby-like in syntax, style, and developer ergonomics.[^2] Although it's an entirely different language. Also a tiny community.

[1]: https://crystal-lang.org/

Crystal is a nice language that's not only simple to read and write but performs very well too. And the documentation is amazing as well.

Ruby is a super fun scripting language. I much prefer it to python when I need something with a little more "ooomph" than bash. It's just...nice...to write in. Ruby performance has come a long way in the last decade as well. There's libraries for pretty much everything.

My modern programming toolkit is basically golang + ruby + bash and I am never left wanting.

I do find Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/) really interesting and am hoping it has its own "ruby on rails" moment that helps the language reach a tipping point in popularity. All the beauty of ruby with all of the speed of Go (and then some, it often compares favorably to languages like rust in benchmarks).