mosquito VS crystal

Marten is a web framework written in Crystal that makes building web applications easy and enjoyable. Mosquito is a background task runner for Crystal that uses Redis and that makes it easy to schedule and run tasks asynchronously.

The Crytal Sidekiq port was a tempting option for a background task runner, but I went with mosquito-cr/mosquito. My initializer looks like this:

I actually already have this implemented with the mosquito shard, but that will be covered in the next post of this series. I'm waiting for at least a day's worth of leaderboard match data to reliably compare with the results above, so stay tuned if interested I guess.

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).