What is Crystal?

Crystal is a new programming language that aims to have a syntax very, very similar to Ruby while at the same time be compiled to native code (through LLVM) and thus hopefully be faster and (also) suitable for low-level tasks.

Motivation

Ruby is nice but it's interpreted and dynamic. Benchmarks for math computations and other low-level tasks compare poorly against language like C, C++, D, and similar languages. But... I love Ruby! I don't have to think about the language, I just focus on the task at hand.

On the other hand, I like the performance you can get with languages like C, C++ and D, but their syntax is awful: lots of semicolons and braces and explicit typing, yuck.

So I want to create a language that's good on both sides: implicit typing, clear, concise syntax, support for blocks and closures, compiled to native code and also run in interpreted mode, and a reasonable performance (might not achieve similar or better performance than C, but hopefully it won't be that far).