Blog post: Crystal's interpreter – A very special holiday present

:christmas_tree: :christmas_tree: :christmas_tree:
A little F.A.Q. about the interpreter can be found here.

Summary: Lots of excitement, lots of things to do!

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I find it funny that at the same time that Ruby gets an experimental JIT compiler, Crystal gets an experimental interpreter.

feels like arriving at the same place from 2 directions :)

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I’d phrase it as that we’re getting at different places with similar tools :slight_smile:
Crystal will still point at type errors before executing code.

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I tried it. Very helpful! :hugs:

Has there been any discussion/thought about having a public API to use it programmatically? I imagine it would be a more performant way to test compiler errors in user code versus what I came up with in Testing compile time errors - #4 by Blacksmoke16. Or would it be essentially the same due to the --no-codegen option?

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Although I prefer the compiler 100%, I understand the interpreter could be useful on some scenarios, as pointed by @Blacksmoke16

Again, congrats to all the Crystal maintainers and community!

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The goal of the testing is not immediately clear. It’s probably better to start a new thread for that with more details.

Let me add that we’re currently facing an issue because of memory interplay between the host program (the compiler) and the interpreter regarding GC.

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