If you have never worked with a strongly typed language before there might be some getting used to that, but any pain is well worth it. Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing. Oh and it’s literally 100x faster than Ruby in some cases.

Those sorts of startup times discourage writing command-line tools (e.g. composable text processing things one might join with pipes).

You know that you are timing the compiler and not the compiled program here?

Rather try "echo 'puts 1' > puts.cr && crystal build puts.cr && time ./puts"

BTW, you can dramatically decrease the cold startup times of ruby if you call it with the options '--disable-gems --disable-rubyopt' if that's an option to you. For many scripts it certainly is.

But even on a 8 years old machine with spinning rust, after the ruby stuff is cached in the OS filesystem cache, my startup time are smaller than 10ms.