As of today, my little GTK hash calculator, Collision, reached 100k installations on Flathub alone! Unfortunately, I don’t have the numbers for distro packages since they don’t usually keep count, but the Flathub stats on their own, show that a non-trivial amount of end users are running GUI software written in Crystal. Including linux mobile phones on aarch64!
(demo)
Collision is (obviously) written in Crystal with C bindings for glib libraries through gi-crystal.The hashes are being calculated using stdlib’s Digest functions, in parallel, allowing it to handle hundreds of files at the same time while keeping the main loop (/ GUI thread) unblocked, thanks to the wonderful execution contexts.
There’s also experimental Windows builds https://nightly.link/GeopJr/Collision/workflows/msys2/main/collision_windows_x86_64.zip
I’ve been documenting my journey, so here’s some links:
- Ultimate GTK4 Crystal Guide: A bit outdated but it covers everything from 0 to a complete application
- Packaging Crystal GTK 4 apps for Windows