Description
Crystal is a language built to be a much smoother C++. Created by Ary Borenszweig, Juan Wajnerman, Brian Cardiff, the object oriented language has Ruby-like syntax. It’s less dynamic than Ruby but has several advances as well, including much better performance.
With full support for macros, you can extend Crystal in many interesting ways. Because it has strong and static typing, you won’t experience as many runtime errors. Since the types are mostly inferred, the type sysem does not come with much overhead. Crystal is open-source software released under the Apache License version 2.0.
History
Crystal was created to solve a problem. Manas.Tech member, Ary Borenszweig, wished there was a language like Ruby, only faster and more type safe. Crystal was born in June 2011 when Ary took the challenge to prove if it was possible to have a compiled Ruby-like language. Work on the language began in June 2011, with the purpose of creating a language with the elegance and productivity of Ruby and the speed, efficiency, and type safety of a compiled language.
The Crystal compiler was first written in Ruby, but later rewritten in Crystal, thus becoming self-hosting, as of November 2013.
Crystal soon became an official Manas.Tech project with most of the initial work being done by Ary Borenszweig, Juan Wajnerman and Brian Cardiff. The first commit was in 2012. The first official version was released in June 2014. In July 2016, Crystal joined the TIOBE index.
You can read more at the manas.tech blog