Returning to the subject of this post, I believe an undeniable reason is that Crystal enjoyed high visibility in its early stages (especially within the Ruby community). However, it failed to release version 1.0 at the most opportune moment (had it been released even slightly earlier, Crystal 2.0 might have already been out, and many features previously considered essential could have been deferred to 2.0). It clearly missed its prime window; as we say in Chinese, it “started early but ended late.”
As stated in the title of my previous post, Why people leaving crystal?, it is not that people never arrived, but rather that they arrived and then left.
Of course, this does not mean there are no opportunities. Although Anthropic entered the market later, they managed to overtake OpenAI in the massive AI market through pure merit (“good wine needs no busboy”).
The downside is that the programming language market is finite; once Crystal misses its window and fails to gain sufficient exposure, the investments already made in other languages will not easily switch back.
(Translated from Chinese using gemma4:26b)