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Crystal

334
351
+ 1
286
Haskell

1.4K
1.2K
+ 1
527
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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.

Decisions about Crystal and Haskell
Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 604.9K views

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.

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Pros of Crystal
Pros of Haskell
  • 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
    Feels like duck types, safe like static types
  • 2
    Null Safety
  • 2
    Type inference
  • 2
    Program compiled into a single binary
  • 2
    Powerful
  • 2
    Meta-Programming (via Macros)
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 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
    Cross-platform
  • 1
    Productivity
  • 1
    Elegant
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
  • 31
    Built-in concurrency
  • 30
    Built-in parallelism
  • 30
    Composable
  • 24
    Referentially transparent
  • 20
    Generics
  • 15
    Type inference
  • 15
    Intellectual satisfaction
  • 12
    If it compiles, it's correct
  • 8
    Flexible
  • 8
    Monads
  • 5
    Great type system
  • 4
    Proposition testing with QuickCheck
  • 4
    One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*
  • 4
    Purely-functional Programming
  • 3
    Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time
  • 3
    Pattern matching and completeness checking
  • 3
    Great maintainability of the code
  • 3
    Fun
  • 3
    Reliable
  • 2
    Best in class thinking tool
  • 2
    Kind system
  • 2
    Better type-safe than sorry
  • 2
    Type classes
  • 1
    Predictable
  • 1
    Orthogonality

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Cons of Crystal
Cons of Haskell
  • 13
    Small community
  • 3
    No windows support
  • 1
    No Oracle lib
  • 9
    Too much distraction in language extensions
  • 8
    Error messages can be very confusing
  • 5
    Libraries have poor documentation
  • 3
    No good ABI
  • 3
    No best practices
  • 2
    Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros
  • 2
    Sometimes performance is unpredictable
  • 1
    Slow compilation
  • 1
    Monads are hard to understand

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- No public GitHub repository available -

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 Haskell?

It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.

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

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JavaScript
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