Meet Crystal - Ruby's compiled younger sibling

By Tony Vincent T.Y

Elevator Pitch

We all know Ruby is awesome, many of us fell in love with its simplicity. But what about speed? Like many interpreted languages Ruby is not known for its speed. What if you have a language as expressive and simple as ruby yet blazingly fast? That’s Crystal Lang for you, Fast as C and Slick as Ruby

Description

require "http/server"

server = HTTP::Server.new(8080) do |context|
    context.response.content_type = "text/plain"
    context.response.print "Hello world, got #{context.request.path}!"
end

puts "Listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080"
server.listen

I bet you can’t tell this Crystal code from Ruby and the best part is Crystal’s performance is on par with Go Lang if not better. This talk is the one you want to listen to for

  • An introduction to Crystal
  • Typical use cases of Crystal
  • Why we chose Crystal for our POS app
  • How we tackled our POS app’s throughput issue with Crystal
  • Pros and cons Of Crystal
  • About Kemal - Sinatra of Crystal

Notes

As seen in Crystal lang’s github page, our firm Red Panthers is one of the few companies in the world that has a production app written in Crystal. I want to share my experience in working on our crystal/kemal POS application that has been successfully handling sales across 2k stores in the US.