RR 392: Crystal and Lucky with Paul Smith & Andrew Mason

Panel: Eric BerryCharles Max WoodNate Hopkins Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew MasonIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out!Show Topics:0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself!1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that!1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal.2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal?2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are...4:17 – Guest mentions compilers. 4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice!4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure.5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you?5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby.6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time.7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it.7:43 – Panelist asks a question. 7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it.8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework?8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with...10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB.11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does!The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more!14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky...15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast!15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers?15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like!16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using...16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix.  18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work.18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to...19:28 – Panel.19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it.19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber?20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at...