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Crystal vs Haskell: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Haskell? An advanced purely-functional programming language. .
Crystal and Haskell can be categorized as "Languages" tools.
"Compiles to efficient native code" is the top reason why over 27 developers like Crystal, while over 72 developers mention "Purely-functional programming " as the leading cause for choosing Haskell.
Crystal is an open source tool with 13.4K GitHub stars and 1.05K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Crystal's open source repository on GitHub.
thoughtbot, DoxIQ, and Wagon are some of the popular companies that use Haskell, whereas Crystal is used by Bitupper, Diploid, and mose. Haskell has a broader approval, being mentioned in 33 company stacks & 45 developers stacks; compared to Crystal, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Crystal
- Compiles to efficient native code38
- Ruby inspired syntax36
- Performance oriented - C-like speeds32
- Gem-like packages, called Shards23
- Can call C code using Crystal bindings20
- Super Fast18
- Typed Ruby <318
- Open Source17
- Minimal Runtime14
- Cute11
- Clean code9
- Concurrent9
- Productive9
- Great community4
- Feels like duck types, safe like static types2
- Null Safety2
- Type inference2
- Program compiled into a single binary2
- Powerful2
- Meta-Programming (via Macros)2
- Simplicity2
- Has builtin LLVM support library1
- Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy1
- Fun to write1
- High-performance1
- Simple, minimal syntax1
- Compile time statically safe macros1
- Concise1
- Statically Safe Monkey Patching1
- Fibers1
- Spawn1
- Meta-programming1
- Cross-platform1
- Productivity1
- Elegant1
Pros of Haskell
- Purely-functional programming90
- Statically typed66
- Type-safe59
- Open source39
- Great community38
- Built-in concurrency31
- Built-in parallelism30
- Composable30
- Referentially transparent24
- Generics20
- Type inference15
- Intellectual satisfaction15
- If it compiles, it's correct12
- Flexible8
- Monads8
- Great type system5
- Proposition testing with QuickCheck4
- One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*4
- Purely-functional Programming4
- Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time3
- Pattern matching and completeness checking3
- Great maintainability of the code3
- Fun3
- Reliable3
- Best in class thinking tool2
- Kind system2
- Better type-safe than sorry2
- Type classes2
- Predictable1
- Orthogonality1
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Cons of Crystal
- Small community13
- No windows support3
- No Oracle lib1
Cons of Haskell
- Too much distraction in language extensions9
- Error messages can be very confusing8
- Libraries have poor documentation5
- No good ABI3
- No best practices3
- Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros2
- Sometimes performance is unpredictable2
- Slow compilation1
- Monads are hard to understand1