Chapter 1
Diving into Crystal

Crystal promises to be “Fast as C, slick as Ruby.” Crystal is an evolutionary change rather than a drastic departure, focusing on clean structures and performance. Crystal, like Ruby, offers a solid object-oriented foundation with functional flavors, and is designed to be approachable to mainstream developers.

In this chapter, you’ll see the advantages and benefits of Crystal, including performance benchmarks and a bit of sample code. If you’re familiar with object-oriented programming, the code should be easy to understand. This chapter isn’t a detailed explanation of the language, however. In later chapters, we’ll explore language syntax and semantics in much greater depth.

If you already know you want to work with Crystal, you’re welcome to skip ahead. You can save this chapter for a day when you need to convince managers, co-workers, and others that they should be using Crystal, too.