Crystal in Q4/2018

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Hello again folks!

It’s been quite some time since I wrote this post and for the end of the year is time for another one :)

First of all, congratulations!! whether you are a core committer, a creator of a shard, someone that introduced crystal at their work, or just a random member of this community, with all your help we are growing at a great pace and creating a nice community.

When I wrote the first post, Crystal was growing a lot slower than now, releases took quite some time to get out and the only thing that was evolving was the backlog, community asked almost everyday for a new releases and for status reports of the long term issues (windows support and parallelism)

Today everything is different:

  • We have had 3 (three!) releases since then, 0.25, 0.26 and 0.27, with a couple of minor releases between them, where the language has gained new features, fixed a LOT of bugs and taken important steps in those long term issues.

  • New core member, congrats @straight-shoota

  • We have a forum! https://forum.crystal-lang.org/

  • New way to collaborate Opencollective

  • Great pace at reviewing and merging PRs

If Crystal keeps this momentum going, 2019 is going to be a great year to the language and its ecosystem. Personally I would like to see more tooling created, I have tried myself, but well, shit is hard.

What do you think? Did you like the progression of everything related to Crystal this year? What do you think it could be improved?

Happy new year Crystal community!!

EDIT: This same post in Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/crystal_programming/comments/ab7sa5/crystal_in_q42018/

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I think 2018 has been a solid year for Crystal (I started using it in mid 17), few breaking changes along the way but nothing that wasn’t well documented or easily fixed. Kemal especially has been rock solid for me, with the encapsulated application support on the way it seems like it will be my go-to framework for a long time to come.

I see a few people wanting IDE support, that will probably arrive with a 1.0 release but I don’t see anything wrong with the current Sublime plugin; I always prefer a text editor and bash over a full IDE mind.

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I agree with drum445, it’s been a great year and am happy for the future and appreciate all the developers/contributors who have worked on the language, and continue to do so.