It always puzzled me why Crystal didn't catch up?

It seems like they just had to publish couple of benchmarks and articles here and there and that could have been it.

As it has good C interop story it could have a good chance riding on AI hype wave few years later in this alternative history.

Crystal had a bit of a slow start. It was promising, but the deployment issues persisted longer than they should have, and by the time they were fixed, you had other toolchains that filled the same niche. Elixir did "ruby" better than crystal OR ruby did.

I really wanted to like Crystal, and used it for a few projects. But the immaturity and timing was it's kryptonite.

> It always puzzled me why Crystal didn't catch up?

M:N wasn't added until late 2019 :( -- https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/8112

Because there's not enough differences/advantages compared to Go.

Metaprogramming, null safety, syntax familiarity (with Ruby), algebraic types - there are quite a lot of advantages/differences, no?

I’m not sure if it changed, but Crystal was limited to a single core which I imagine made it easier to choose Go over Crystal.

That and I’ve found that folks often aren’t very receptive to Ruby like syntaxes initially.

This thread's context is large rails userbase around 2008'ish (people were changing computers from pcs to macs with textmate to do rails, perception of devs changed from nerds to cool kids - the whole thing was quite huge) that dissolved substantially. Crystal's syntax in this context feels like huge wasted/missed opportunity.

This claim seems to be supported by Google Trends [1]

Rails has been on a downward trend for the last 6 years.

[1] https://trends.google.co.in/trends/explore?cat=958&date=2017...