I think Crystal is a successful programming language. It has been actively developed for over 10 years, reached version 1.0, and is used by companies in production. From what I’ve seen, the Crystal community continues to grow slowly and steadily, and I expect it will keep growing at its own pace.
Collaboration doesn’t happen as easily as it could, though. Crystal has strict typing, so libraries that sit unmaintained for a few years rarely work without updates. This might be part of the reason. I don’t fully understand what’s holding back collaboration, but I think we need to identify those barriers and tackle them one by one.
In recent years, the Crystal core team has overcome major technical challenges like parallel execution, Windows support, and removing the libevent dependency. Before that, we were mostly just running away from these dragons, but we’ve finally gained enough breathing room to focus on collaboration.
(Translated with Claude)