icr VS crystal

it's had an IRB-like REPL for years. It just wasn't built into the language. Admittedly it was limited compared to IRB but it was more than enough to test out quick ideas.

It's called ICR: Interactive Crystal

https://github.com/crystal-community/icr

the first release was back in 2017

I wrote a Crystal kernel for Jupyter, just a modified bash_kernel, 140 lines of code, but it was tiring because I don't have enough Python ability. icrystal is the widely used Jupyter kernel for Crystal, which uses ICR . On the other hand, this crystal_kernel uses the official crystal interpreter.

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).