We’re celebrating the first year of Crystal 1.X with a new release! 
We’ve written a blog post summarizing the changes in this release: Crystal 1.4.0 released! - The Crystal Programming Language . While we have tested it against several known and sizeable projects, that doesn’t preclude the existence of regressions. If you find an issue, please check the issue tracker and file a bug: it will be fixed in a patch version.
The full changelog is here: Release 1.4.0 · crystal-lang/crystal · GitHub .
It is already available on the supported platforms, check the install page for details. That includes docker images 
, snapcraft, .deb and .rpm packages, and brew formula 
.
Happy Crystallizing!
26 Likes
I recompiled one of my reference programs with 1.4.0 that uses a bitarray.
1.3.2 75.25s
1.4.0 53.44s
Thank you @HertzDevil for those optimizations. Yu da man!! 
It’s only a couple of seconds slower (for given inputs) than the version using Slices with 64-bit memory elements, and simpler to code.
11 Likes
I’ve been waiting for this:
New macro method parse_type to parse a type given as a String (docs).
4 Likes
Me too ;) Now maybe we’ll figure out a good solution to [RFC] Macro Defs - Methods in Macro land · Issue #8835 · crystal-lang/crystal · GitHub and someone will pick it up in time for 1.5 
.
1 Like
Now I am waiting for the interpreter support compiled by default
4 Likes
I think the interpreter is incomplete at this point, so I would think it wouldn’t be compiled by default until it hits a certain threshold of stability
1 Like