My 2025 Crystal Wishlist

My wishlist for crystal:

  1. An actual good GUI library. Many suggestions for UI libraries are things like crsfml with ImGUI or something, and that isn’t accessibility to individuals with disabilities such as myself, which is very saddening.
  2. Complete windows support (possibly with full bindings to the win32 API? I would do this myself, but I’m struggling to figure out the winmd format – it’s so unnecessarily complicated…).
  3. A C bindings generator and/or a way of binding standalone C header files to Crystal would be great to see (pun intended).

I’m new to Crystal and am slowly learning it, but I like the syntax and how simple it is.

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@ethindp The GTK bindings are working well to write desktop apps (win, mac, linux). I haven’t tried the QT bindings yet (that would allow to also target mobiles). See gobject@0.10.0 on Shardbox (gtk3) and gtk4@0.17.0 on Shardbox for starters.

You can already use Crystal on Windows and write Windows applications in Crystal: most of everything is working (huge shootout to @HertzDevil :heart:).

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GTK is a great choice for Mac and Linux, but is surprisingly tedious to use on Windows. I wonder if anyone has had success creating GTK apps for Windows using Crystal?

You will soon be able to use gtk4.cr on Windows under MSYS2: Support MSYS2 by HertzDevil · Pull Request #169 · hugopl/gi-crystal · GitHub

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GTK is not accessible on anything but Linux unless something has changed?

IIRC that hasn’t been true for 10+ years

A bit uncertain what/who your replying to, my self, but the inaccessibility of GTK4 on win32 is at least true. (If I’m confusing your post with something else, apologies. :))

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Perhaps the only thing I disagree with. Rails is a luxury prison for ruby. It’s already on the decline, one day it will effectively die and take ruby with it. A good language should have good apps, but also be reasonably independent of them. All long lasting languages are like this

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