Appendix A: Tooling Setup

The Crystal compiler is responsible for analyzing Crystal code and producing debug and release-grade executables. The usual flow of writing code and then using the compiler to build and run your application can be entirely done using the command-line interface, but it quickly gets tedious.

This appendix will teach you how to configure and use Crystal from Visual Studio Code with standard IDE features, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, hovering over symbols for more information, exploring the classes and methods defined in a file, building the project, and running it. If you use other code editors, the instructions should be similar.