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Crystal Programming

You're reading from   Crystal Programming A project-based introduction to building efficient, safe, and readable web and CLI applications

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Product type Paperback
Published in May 2022
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801818674
Length 356 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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George Dietrich George Dietrich
Author Profile Icon George Dietrich
George Dietrich
Guilherme Bernal Guilherme Bernal
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Guilherme Bernal
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Toc

Table of Contents (26) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Part 1: Getting Started
2. Chapter 1: An Introduction to Crystal FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Basic Semantics and Features of Crystal 4. Chapter 3: Object-Oriented Programming 5. Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
6. Chapter 4: Exploring Crystal via Writing a Command-Line Interface 7. Chapter 5: Input/Output Operations 8. Chapter 6: Concurrency 9. Chapter 7: C Interoperability 10. Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
11. Chapter 8: Using External Libraries 12. Chapter 9: Creating a Web Application with Athena 13. Part 4: Metaprogramming
14. Chapter 10: Working with Macros 15. Chapter 11: Introducing Annotations 16. Chapter 12: Leveraging Compile-Time Type Introspection 17. Chapter 13: Advanced Macro Usages 18. Part 5: Supporting Tools
19. Chapter 14: Testing 20. Chapter 15: Documenting Code 21. Chapter 16: Deploying Code 22. Chapter 17: Automation 23. Other Books You May Enjoy Appendix A: Tooling Setup 1. Appendix B: The Future of Crystal

Incremental compilation and better tooling

Crystal uses a type inference system that applies to the whole program at once to analyze and identify every expression type on the program. This is different from the usual type inference of other languages because it works across method boundaries, and argument types don't need to be explicitly typed. It has a cost, however. Analyzing the entire program for types requires, well, the entire program, all at once. Any change to any line in any file causes the whole analysis to be repeated from the start.

Compiling and analyzing Crystal programs is a little slower than in other languages, but this is the tradeoff for the excellent performance and awesome syntax, semantics, and expressiveness.

There are extensions for many code editors and IDEs supporting Crystal, but they are mainly based on the compiler itself, and thus they don't offer incremental analysis of the program and the developer often has to wait a few seconds before...

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