We already have TruffleRuby and JRuby using advnaced JITs courtacy of the JVM. Whilst both show that amazing things are possible I think Crystal is still ahead of both in terms of raw performance.
The best reason to use either Ruby or Crystal is because you want to and leave it at that.
> The best reason to use either Ruby or Crystal is because you want to and leave it at that.
Language religious wars are idiotic, but pros/cons tradeoffs should be discussed .
There is/was a great deal of fragmentation. TruffleRuby is built on awesome tech, to be sure. Rubinius (rbx) and JRuby were awesome too. I remember the grand attempt by RedHat to make TorqueBox a better, enterprisy Rails platform on JRuby.
Yeah, Crystal is neat when it works, based on a slightly different language, static compilation, and LLVM. The gotchas include: it's too incompatible with Ruby to be a drop-in replacement, has numerous language oddities and deficiencies, and tends to uncover runtime bugs within minutes of use. I think for needing speed and after profiling a critical section to replace with native code, it's better to opt for a native extension such with Rust and https://usehelix.com to use with standard Ruby (mri).
Hopefully, 3.5-dev+ zjit bears fruit.
I don't do much Ruby development anymore because Elixir and Rust exist. (And also rustler!)
