The TL;DR is that it’s compiled Ruby.

I am primarily a Ruby on Rails developer using Docker images to deploy. If you know anything about the Ruby on Rails ecosystem for the past few years Webpack, Node and Friends™ were pretty standard.

I’ve managed to rip out the entire JacaScript runtime from production (thank God) but Ruby containers are still pretty sizable on their own.

What I’m excited about with Crystal is that it’s still a high-level language but it brings in static typing, NULL checking at compile-time, etc.

When it comes to Docker I can compile my app in a build step then completely gut out the container and only ship what I need: the binaries and assets.

Memory is another huge advantage since I’m not shipping an entire interpreter.