Crystal

[jhass]

Jonne Haß, me@jhass.eu, Crystal project, Core member

Supporting applicants:

Stephanie Wilde-Hobbs, steph@rx14.co.uk, Crystal project, Core member
Brian J. Cardiff, bcardiff@manas.tech, Crystal project/Manas Tech, Core member/Principal Engineer, Product Manager & Researcher

The Crystal programming language^{0, 1}

A language for humans and computers.

Crystal has Ruby inspired syntax, is statically typed with automatic union types and a powerful macro language for a dynamic feel, compiles to native code using LLVM as a backend and has coroutines at the heat of its concurrency model.

It's nearing its 1.0 release, has an active community and is used in production at several companies besides many personal projects.

Which members of the community would benefit from your work?

Crystal does not focus on a niche but wants to be a general purpose programming language. As such its community is as broad. Supporting ARM builds of Crystal programs will enable a wide variety of usecases for many current and future members of our community.

Crystal was previously ported to AArch64, among other ARM targets. Unfortunately since then we did not have a CI solution for testing these targets. Thus the support degraded a bit over the time. I've recently invested time to brush it up again^{2, 3, 4} and would love for history not to repeat itself. Therefore I'm pursing resources for a CI pipeline on ARM.

I hope this will enable us to provide Tier 1 support for AArch64 and other ARM architectures⁵ soon.

Is the code that you’re going to run 100% open source? If so, what is the URL or URLs where it is located?

Yes. I'm planning to make any infrastructure automation developed for this system fully open source as well.

What infrastructure (computing resources and network access) do you need?

Before coming here I have evalutated various alternatives for an AArch64 CI, namely QEMU emulation on Github Actions⁶, Drone's Cloud ARM offering⁷ and Travis' ARM offering⁸. Unfortunately none of these make it remotely possible to ensure continued AArch64 compatibility by running on pull request builds at our community's contributions rate.

To keep our build below the acceptable limit of 90 minutes (with a preferred runtime of below 60 minutes), we'll need a decent CPU and about 8GB of RAM. Ideally I would love to have two pipelines, one for musl libc and one for GNU libc. Finally I would love to expand this beyond AArch64 and support older Armv7 and maybe Armv6 based targets as well in the near future.

So a bigger Arm64 machine that we can also emulate older architectures on seems necessary.

Describe the continuous integration (CI) system in use or desired for this project.

I'm planning on hosting a self-hosted runner for Github Actions on the provided hardware.

Please state your contributions to the open source community and any other relevant initiatives

I'm active as a core member of the Crystal project for many years now and consistently active in discussions and community support channels throughout, along the occassional code contributions and code reviews to the compiler project itself, I maintain and run the online code evaluation service^{9, 10} and bindings for GObject based libraries¹¹ among other smaller efforts.

[RX14]

To clarify the technical details: we need about 8GB of ram per pipeline worker. One would be great, but being able to run 2 or more parallel jobs on one machine would be wonderful. Singlethread performance is quite important.

[vielmetti]

We should be good to go with this one - got the 👍 from the relevant folks today.

I'm marking this as "approved", and will follow through in the next couple of days with access info.

[jhass]

Great news, thank you! :)

[jhass]

First CI builds on the provided hardware passed 🎉 crystal-lang/crystal#9508

[jacobsmith928]

Wonderful!

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 7:03 PM Jonne Haß ***@***.***> wrote: First CI builds on the provided hardware passed 🎉 crystal-lang/crystal#9508 <crystal-lang/crystal#9508> — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#206 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB46TKJIUFA72OVEBMDAJSTRXKMLHANCNFSM4NZALRAQ> .

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