I implemented support for the `:showdoc:` directive - happy to answer any questions!

https://totalrealreturns.com

At the bottom you will see the page rendered in 2 - 3ms or sometimes 800µs with Crystal. The page is quite literally bottlenecked by network latency.

Once Crystal Stablise, with Windows Support done and other bits and pieces. I hope the tooling and compiler speed gets more attention. It might became the perfect tools for most things.

Really cool to see a language make concurrency and parallelism its primary goal, rather than an afterthought.

(yes I know erlang/elixir exists, but Crystal seems bent on being CPU-fast too!)

I love this language but have never found a production use case for it, versus just using something less obscure like Go. It's the Ruby we wish we had in the 10s.

I really like Crystal, but I am too dependent on LSPs and such for productivity, and the Crystal LSP leaves a lot to be desired, even though it is fantastic work for what it is.

Can't rely on AI either, as it constantly confuses it with Ruby.

I did do a few backend/server code challenges and advent code in Crystal. It worked really well and was very powerful.

I would love to write my MMO server in it, but again, tooling is still a sore spot for me.

Questions to anyone using Crystal in production:

* How is the GC latency, considering that Crystal uses the Boehm GC?

* Have you encountered any problems in long running programs due to the conservative nature of Boehm?

I really love Crystal, but always bummed that its web ecosystem doesn't perform as well as it should on benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23

I like reading manuals in pdf format here is none. The web documentation is very short, I imagine that when making any project there will be many details I should like to know, and it is very handy to have some pdf with complete documentation to avoid wasting time.

I couldn’t click on your link in the HN app.

Link to announcement: https://crystal-lang.org/2025/04/09/1.16.0-released

Also, it’s really cool to see them focusing on concurrency and parallelism. I hope some of that inspirations upstreams to Ruby (syntax wise, maybe not semantically).

One thing I really wish they implemented is making it possible for building standalone binaries that can be run cross-platform, or at least cross-compilation. That would be really cool, I would contribute to that issue if I had knowledge!

How has using Crystal been, anyone using it in production?

I love Crystal but I’m surprised at how nothing the WASM story is this late in the game. I’d love to run Crystal directly in the browser, especially given how web-focused they seem to be.

Also, windows support has been more or less “done” for a couple of years now, is the “preview” tag still necessary?

May be time to dust off that raylib + crystal project and go try a game jam. I think I'll use this wrapper https://github.com/sol-vin/raylib-cr

Anyone using it successfully on OS-less embedded systems? (microcontrollers or very small SBCs) Crystal, and Zig for that matter, subsets could be interesting and more performing substitutes for Micropython where speed is vital and one still wants to keep on a higher level than ASM or C, however last time I checked there were only a few isolated experiments.

OK I have a new project starting and I'll try this for fun instead of the usual rust.