I looked closely at Crystal when it first got popular but they removed the REPL which for me made Elixir a better choice.

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abc42 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They have an interactive mode right now (crystal i), but it's not very comprehensive. You cannot use certain libraries with it etc.

Shouldn't be terribly hard to make it good though. Some time ago, I added a JIT REPL in a few afternoons with Claude, ending up with roughly the same performance as their compiler, and with it working reliably with all the libraries I tested. But since they don't want LLM contributions in Crystal, I just left it as an interesting experiment and started working on my own language instead.

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ch4s3 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been doing precisely the same thing https://march-lang.org/docs/playground/

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abc42 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Crazy how easy it is these days, isn't it? The last 20% that matters is gonna be a bit harder though, I assume. Plus with everybody being able to do it means that making yours be interesting is going to be extra difficult.

	▲	ch4s3 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is a lot easier, but I've been working on this language project for almost 8 months now. I've spent a lot of time in research papers and thinking about both dev UX and how it works with LLMs. Knocking together a working compiler on LLVM is WAY easier now, but making something nice is still hard. A language is so much more than a compiler and syntax. So to your point, standing out is incredibly hard. I'm doing this because it interests me and I'm learning, but it does feel quixotic at times.