Crystal Lang

The problem When we write our programs or libraries, usually we ship to the end user a packaged binary. If a user wants to report a bug or ask for a feature, one of the most important information to have is “which version of the software are you using ?” Since as any good programmer you likely use a source code control system, you should not rely only on the numeric version, but it’s practical to include also the git commit hash of the software you are actually shipping. ...

Nostalgia time! Today I decided to play with Raylib and the Crystal Programming Language. Technically speaking, the “plasma” effect is just a two variables noise function. Some used Perlin Noise, others the Diamond-square algorithm. A more interesting pattern can be obtained with trigonometrical functions, as explained here. The interesting part here is the easyness of graphics programming in a Linux environment with a high level, yet performant and statically typed programming language. The code is straightforward and a simple port of the original ‘C’ source, I got surprised how the Crystal Language is easy to use and produces a quite fast native binary. If you want to check it out, you can find on my github account; in the meantime enjoy the mandatory video/screenshot :) ...

I’ve started a new side project named Crystal Koans, it’s a simple series of exercises organized as a big unit test suite. The “koans” are heavily inspired by similar projects for other languages, but I didn’t found anything similar for Crystal. The project has been included in the awesome collection under the official Learning Resource for the language. I’ll try to maintain and evolve it in the spare time, I hope you’ll find it useful, and any form of contribution is welcome. ...