Crystal

Crystal is a programming language with the following goals:

• Have the same syntax as Ruby, or at least as similar as possible.
• Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument.
• Be able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal.
• Have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code.
• Compile to efficient native code.

Why?

We love Ruby's efficiency for writing code.

We love C's efficiency for running code.

We want the best of both worlds.

We want the compiler to understand what we mean without having to specify types everywhere.

We want full OOP.

Oh, and we don't want to write C code to make the code run faster.

Status

• The project is in pre-alpha stage: we are still designing the language.
• The compiler is written in Crystal.
• Includes the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector, but this will change in the future.

Installing

Currently it only works on Mac OSX and Linux 32/64 bit.

Installing on Mac OSX using Homebrew

brew tap manastech/crystal
brew install crystal

Installing from source repository

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/manastech/crystal.git
2. Execute bin/crystal --setup
3. You will need libgc. In Mac: brew install bdw-gc. In Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libgc-dev. You may also need libunwind7 and libpcre3, depending on what programs you run. On Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libunwind7-dev libpcre3-dev.

That's all. Try to run:

bin/crystal --help

Or compile some example:

bin/crystal samples/mandelbrot.cr --run

Community

Questions or suggestions? Ask in our Google Group or join our IRC channel #crystal-lang at irc.freenode.net