Clojure vs Crystal

Overview

Clojure

Stacks1.9K

Followers1.4K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars10.7K

Forks1.5K

Crystal

Stacks341

Followers350

Votes286

GitHub Stars20.0K

Forks1.7K

Clojure vs Crystal: What are the differences?

Clojure: A dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system; Crystal: Fast as C, slick as Ruby. 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.

Clojure and Crystal can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.

"It is a lisp" is the primary reason why developers consider Clojure over the competitors, whereas "Compiles to efficient native code" was stated as the key factor in picking Crystal.

Clojure and Crystal are both open source tools. Crystal with 13.5K GitHub stars and 1.05K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Clojure with 7.85K GitHub stars and 1.25K GitHub forks.

CircleCI, Groupon, and Soundcloud are some of the popular companies that use Clojure, whereas Crystal is used by Bitupper, Diploid, and mose. Clojure has a broader approval, being mentioned in 95 company stacks & 80 developers stacks; compared to Crystal, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

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Advice on Clojure, Crystal

Fronted

Nov 23, 2020

Decided

We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.

You can read all about it in our linked blog post.

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Detailed Comparison

Clojure	Crystal
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.	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 10.7K	GitHub Stars 20.0K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 1.7K
Stacks 1.9K	Stacks 341
Followers 1.4K	Followers 350
Votes 1.1K	Votes 286
Pros & Cons
Pros 118 It is a lisp 101 Concise syntax 100 Persistent data structures 90 jvm-based language 89 Concurrency Cons 11 Cryptic stacktraces 5 Need to wrap basically every java lib 4 Toxic community 3 Slow application startup 3 Good code heavily relies on local conventions	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
Integrations
Java	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Clojure, Crystal?

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 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

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

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 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

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 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# (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 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 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.

Related Comparisons

"It is a lisp" is the primary reason why developers consider Clojure over the competitors, whereas "Compiles to efficient native code" was stated as the key factor in picking Crystal.

Clojure vs Crystal