sorbet-rails VS crystal-docker-quickstart

There are solutions like sorbet[^1] and sorbet-rails[^2]. Have you tried them?

[^1]: https://sorbet.org/

[^2]: https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/sorbet-rails

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