We are delivering a new Crystal release with several bugfixes and improvements.

I learned about Crystal from somebody’s Lemmy comment a couple weeks ago. Amazing and under rated language.

Their announcement is pretty lackluster tho lol.

  • kool_newt@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’ve looked into Elixir a bit, I’d probably be into it or Rust if Crystal didn’t exist, more so than Go. Something about languages that run in a VM turns me off tho, reminds me of Java too much I guess. I’ve never heard of Gleam, that makes two languages I’ve learned of due to Lemmy in like 3 weeks!

    • Alex@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t dismiss VM languages outright. I’m also not a fan of the Java VM but the two VMs are very much very different. Also Erlang (and it’s VM) were built for telecommunication, and the problems they tried to solve 30 years ago with it are very similar to modern backend engineering problems.

      Erlang is in large parts also what allowed WhatsApp to scale to it’s userbase with only 30 engineers.

        • Alex@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Between Elixir and Erlang, or between the Java and Erlang VM?

          Elixir and Erlang are distinct languages. Here the comparison to the Java VM is apt, in that it’s like Java and Clojure. Different languages, same VM.

          If you want an overview on the differences between the VMs then that would be too much for this comment. Here is an article on Erlang Solutions talking about some of them more in depth. If I piqued your curiosity I can also highly recommend this talk from Sasa Yuric. It’s not long and very concisely captures what makes the BEAM so nice to use.

          • kool_newt@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Between Elixir and Erlang. Erlang is what’s used in telecom right? Is Elixir as well? Is Elixir like a new improved Erlang? I’ve heard so much about Elixir recently.

            You have piqued my interest, I’ve recently gotten back into programming (I do “devops” for work) and don’t really consider myself a programmer, but I find languages fascinating. I was lucky enough to join a study group on compiler design with an Apache project leader and while it was over my head, I learned a lot and enjoyed it.

            (I know I could look this up, but enjoying the conversation :)