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Crystal vs Erlang

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Crystal
341
350
+ 1
286
Erlang
1.3K
748
+ 1
345
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Crystal vs Erlang: What are the differences?

Developers describe Crystal as "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. On the other hand, Erlang is detailed as "A programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability". Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.

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

"Compiles to efficient native code" is the top reason why over 27 developers like Crystal, while over 49 developers mention "Real time, distributed applications" as the leading cause for choosing Erlang.

Crystal and Erlang are both open source tools. Crystal with 13.5K GitHub stars and 1.05K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Erlang with 7.74K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Erlang has a broader approval, being mentioned in 70 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Crystal, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

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Pros of Crystal
Pros of Erlang
  • 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
  • 18
    Super Fast
  • 18
    Typed Ruby <3
  • 17
    Open Source
  • 14
    Minimal Runtime
  • 11
    Cute
  • 9
    Clean code
  • 9
    Concurrent
  • 9
    Productive
  • 4
    Great community
  • 2
    Powerful
  • 2
    Program compiled into a single binary
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Meta-Programming (via Macros)
  • 2
    Feels like duck types, safe like static types
  • 2
    Null Safety
  • 2
    Type inference
  • 1
    Has builtin LLVM support library
  • 1
    Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy
  • 1
    Fun to write
  • 1
    High-performance
  • 1
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 1
    Compile time statically safe macros
  • 1
    Concise
  • 1
    Statically Safe Monkey Patching
  • 1
    Fibers
  • 1
    Spawn
  • 1
    Meta-programming
  • 1
    Productivity
  • 1
    Elegant
  • 1
    Cross-platform
  • 62
    Real time, distributed applications
  • 62
    Concurrency Support
  • 58
    Fault tolerance
  • 36
    Soft real-time
  • 32
    Open source
  • 22
    Message passing
  • 22
    Functional programming
  • 16
    Immutable data
  • 14
    Works as expected
  • 6
    Facebook chat uses it at backend
  • 5
    Practical
  • 5
    Knowledgeable community
  • 4
    Bullets included
  • 1
    WhatsApp uses it at backend

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Cons of Crystal
Cons of Erlang
  • 13
    Small community
  • 3
    No windows support
  • 1
    No Oracle lib
  • 1
    Languange is not popular demand

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What is Crystal?

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.

What is Erlang?

Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.

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What companies use Crystal?
What companies use Erlang?
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What tools integrate with Crystal?
What tools integrate with Erlang?

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What are some alternatives to Crystal and Erlang?
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.
Node.js
Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
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.
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
See all alternatives

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