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  5. Crystal vs Rust

Crystal vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K
Crystal
Crystal
Stacks341
Followers350
Votes286
GitHub Stars20.0K
Forks1.7K

Crystal vs Rust: What are the differences?

Introduction

When comparing Crystal and Rust, it's important to understand the key differences between these two languages to determine which one is best suited for a specific project or use case.

  1. Memory management: Crystal uses a garbage collector for automatic memory management, while Rust relies on a unique ownership system that ensures memory safety without the need for garbage collection. This gives Rust a performance advantage in situations where strict memory control is crucial.

  2. Concurrency model: Rust emphasizes on thread safety with its ownership and borrowing system, making it easier to write concurrent and parallel programs. On the other hand, Crystal provides lightweight fibers for concurrency, which can be more approachable for developers new to concurrent programming.

  3. Type system: Crystal features a more conventional object-oriented type system with static typing, similar to languages like Ruby. In contrast, Rust employs a strong static type system with lifetimes and borrowing rules, providing strict compile-time checks for memory safety and thread concurrency.

  4. Error handling: Rust uses the Result type and the Option type to handle errors and nullable values, ensuring that errors are handled explicitly by the developer. In comparison, Crystal uses exceptions for error handling, which can simplify code but may also lead to unexpected behavior if not properly managed.

  5. Community and ecosystem: Rust has a larger and more mature ecosystem with established libraries and tools for various use cases, making it easier to find support and resources for development. Crystal, while growing rapidly, has a smaller community and fewer libraries available, which can impact the ease of development in certain scenarios.

  6. Compilation and performance: Rust's ahead-of-time compilation allows it to produce highly optimized and efficient code, making it a popular choice for system programming tasks. Crystal, with its Just-In-Time compilation, offers a smoother development experience with instant feedback, but may sacrifice some performance compared to Rust.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Crystal and Rust in areas such as memory management, concurrency model, type system, error handling, community support, and compilation performance can help developers make an informed decision on which language to choose for their projects.

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Manual

Advice on Rust, Crystal

Timm
Timm

VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH

Nov 10, 2020

Decided

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

682k views682k
Comments
Johan
Johan

Jan 28, 2021

Decided

Context: Writing an open source CLI tool.

Go and Rust over Python: Simple distribution.

With Go and Rust, just build statically compiled binaries and hand them out.

With Python, have people install with "pip install --user" and not finding the binaries :(.

Go and Rust over Python: Startup and runtime performance

Go and Rust over Python: No need to worry about which Python interpreter version is installed on the users' machines.

Go over Rust: Simplicity; Rust's memory management comes at a development / maintenance cost.

Go over Rust: Easier cross compiles from macOS to Linux.

397k views397k
Comments
Omar
Omar

Feb 23, 2021

Needs adviceonRubyRubyJavaScriptJavaScriptRustRust

I was thinking about adding a new technology to my current stack (Ruby and JavaScript). But, I want a compiled language, mainly for speed and scalability reasons compared to interpreted languages. I have tried each one (Rust, Java, and Kotlin). I loved them, and I don't know which one can offer me more opportunities for the future (I'm in my first year of software engineering at university).

Which language should I choose?

443k views443k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust
Rust
Crystal
Crystal

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Crystal is a programming language that resembles Ruby but compiles to native code and tries to be much more efficient, at the cost of disallowing certain dynamic aspects of Ruby.

-
Ruby-inspired syntax.;Statically type-checked but without having to specify the type of variables or method arguments.;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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Stars
20.0K
GitHub Forks
13.9K
GitHub Forks
1.7K
Stacks
6.1K
Stacks
341
Followers
5.0K
Followers
350
Votes
1.2K
Votes
286
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 146
    Guaranteed memory safety
  • 133
    Fast
  • 89
    Open source
  • 75
    Minimal runtime
  • 73
    Pattern matching
Cons
  • 28
    Hard to learn
  • 24
    Ownership learning curve
  • 12
    Unfriendly, verbose syntax
  • 4
    High size of builded executable
  • 4
    Variable shadowing
Pros
  • 38
    Compiles to efficient native code
  • 36
    Ruby inspired syntax
  • 32
    Performance oriented - C-like speeds
  • 23
    Gem-like packages, called Shards
  • 20
    Can call C code using Crystal bindings
Cons
  • 13
    Small community
  • 3
    No windows support
  • 1
    No Oracle lib

What are some alternatives to Rust, Crystal?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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