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.
