Speeding Up Ruby with Shared Strings (opens in new tab)

You don't? The joke of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force needs to be updated with the Crystal one, near as I can tell. Nearly every thread where Ruby's discussed has the Crystal Guy (specific identity of any given Crystal Guy up for debate) parachuting in.

Crystal is not the next language for this Ruby developer. Ruby remains it, along with JavaScript when Node makes sense. It often feels like the folks evangelizing Crystal really don't get why people use Ruby--if I need static typing I'm going to go use Kotlin or Rust or C++; looking like Ruby and not having any of the things that make Ruby valuable to me (namely, the features implied by dynamic typing, and to forestall the usual, no, Crystal macros don't replace it) is a demerit, not a positive.

But Crystal is a totally different language. The syntax and some things like the basic object model look similar, but the whole way you use it and the ecosystem are totally separate. I don't think it's 'basically Ruby' at all - I don't think much of the Ruby ecosystem (Rails for example) would translate onto Crystal.

Departing the Ruby ecosystem is a dealbreaker in many situations. Crystal is faster but you’re gonna spend more time reinventing the wheel and building common tools that are sitting on the shelf in Ruby land. Not picking a side here, just trying to point out why Ruby is still very popular.

Neither are "next languages," all three differ significantly in scope. For the western Ruby dev (meaning Rails people) there is a much clearer and more consistent path forward with Elixir/Phoenix.

> Kinda suprised when I see title like that on HN that not so many people are talking about Crystal

There is a dedicated contingent promoting Crystal in every thread about Ruby. Don't really know that we need any more (better, perhaps, but not more.)

> Basically Ruby with C performances.

Well, vaguely Ruby-ish syntax, without the dynamic features or ecosystem, and with a static type system.

> So far I’ve been more convinced by Crystal than Elixir as the next language for a Ruby developer.

Not sure what that has the do with the subject here, which has nothing to do with either Elixir or the next language for a Ruby developer.

Language (or tool) evangelism with no connection to be thread beyond offering an alternative to a language mentioned in the thread is basically a uniquely geeky form of threadcrapping, and its really not any better than any other threadcrapping.

I assume if all you're building are command-line apps, that might be true. Generally speaking though, I think most Ruby developers are smart enough to move where the market and ecosystem is, and are not constrained by syntax.

Go to Crystal if you just want to go faster.

Go to Elixir if you actually want to learn more, expand your mind, and are tired of bugs that can only occur in a mutable OOP language. And if you want to take advantage of the extra guarantees provided by a functional language, such as functional immutable datastructures making concurrency idiotproof.

Crystal is so strict about type coercions, it's actually way harder to use than you realize.

Seriously, try converting over a decently complex script to crystal from ruby, you'll run into complicated problems.

Elixir is a successful experiment. Crystal could have become a success if they decided to have 100% syntactic equivalence. As it is, it requires rewrites in even trivial console scripts.

Good question, I'll have to read up on it. It looks like it's possible to share out of the middle of a string with MRI, but it requires certain compiler options that aren't on by default.

Thanks for the comment! <3

It’s not quite that simple. Java strings and ruby strings have quite different semantics because Java strings are immutable whilst Ruby strings are both mutable and can be mutated in place by C extensions. In Truffleruby we use ropes to represent strings which allow sharing of substrings and convert them to unique mutable ropes when they are accessed by C extensions, but that requires quite a lot of machinery to implement.

There are significant differences. Depending on the case, it can be more or less effective.

1) If you intern all strings, then you're guaranteed to have one copy of "Hello World", which this doesn't (you could concatenate "Hello" and "World" twice).

2) String interning doesn't let similar strings share the same array. The Ruby trick lets you have

    "Hello World"
    "World"
    "orld"
    "rld"
    "ld"
    "d"

all share the same underlying array, whereas string interning gives you a separate array for each.

Thank you so much. This really means a lot to me!

24. VALUE is 40 bytes and needs two 8-byte elements.