Crystal heavily utilises the famously clean & pragmatic syntax of Ruby, extended with a strict static type system, simplifying & improving the experience of OOP in the ruby paradigm.[1]
Much like rust, it has a fair amount of type safety built-in; the common case of the billion dollar mistake is simply not possible within the language due to null reference checking embedded into the compiler, as all types can be checked for being nil-able.
Inheritance
Everything in crystal is an object. Base types, classes, functions, everything.
This is why we can have strong type casting such as:
my_num = Int32.new(256)
pp my_num # => 256: Int32
# Which is also equivalent to simply:
num : Int32 = 256
# In crystal, the space after the declaration is required
# otherwise it will be inferred as a property selector.
Similarly, we can write the same space within memory; i.e:
string = IO::Memory.new "hihi!" # In crystal, calling functions with parens is optional.
io.pos # => 0
io.gets 2 # => "hi"We can extend this logic into more high-level components by creating our own classes, in crystal known as abstract classes.
These are classes that essentially define the structure & data that all subsequent classes must have.
In a real-world context, this may be useful when instantiating several types of the same object. However, it is not recommended to use abstract classes as base blueprints for other objects/classes, which will be covered a bit later.
A good example of using abstract data types is shown here;
abstract class Engine
def initialize(@name : String, @version : String)
property memthread : Fiber
end
abstract def run
abstract def stop
end
class RustEngine : Engine
def initialize(@name = “CTEngine”, @version = “0.1.0”)
memthread = Fiber.new
end
def run
spawn name: @name do
memthread.timeout 12.seconds
end
end
def stop
# Halt the engine execution by stopping a fiber.
memthread.yield
end
end
Avoid encapsulation
Encapsulation is something that should always be avoided in Object-Oriented Programming, unless you really know what you are doing. The most common nightmare it can cause is a hierarchy of dependencies, cross-cutting to share values & extend from other classes & in turn, shared mutable state.
Which, as every Java programmer knows, is a special layer of hell.
Say for example you are using encapsulation techniques to write an inventory for a pet store, and you wish to archive all the animals within the store, with optimised searching for an ORM. With encapsulation, one’s first thought would be to make a base class for Animal, as this helps with ORM pattern searching.
abstract class Animal
property legs, arms, nose
end
class Cat : Animal
property meow
# Defining the properties of a cat
end
class Dog : Animal
property bark
end
So far so good. However, the main issue occurs when there is an animal that shares the properties of both
types of animal; for example, an animal that could have the qualities of both a cat and dog; and be listed as either a cat or a dog would require having to first go through the tree to derive from both animal, then cat, then dog, then whatever else was before, which makes objects extremely hard to debug and maintain long-term longevity.
class CatDog : ???Macros
Finally, crystal’s intuitive macro system works extremely well for polmorphic & dynamically generated code during runtime.
For example, in the use of creating a html template:
macro iteration(name, max_limit)
def {{name}}
iter = 0
breakpoint = iter / rand({{max_limit}})
loop do
iter += 1
break if iter == {{max_limit}}
break if iter == breakpoint
end
return iter
end
end
iteration below_1200, 1200
puts below_1200
Package management
Crystal also has a modern package management system, known as shards, which are modules, binaries & libraries for the language.[2]
To set up a crystal project, the easiest way to do this is also with shards, by running:
shards init --app, or with --lib to generate a library package with crystal’s in-built test suite.
This suite can be accessed & used by writing test cases within the spec folder of your newly generated project.
Take a look at the Crystal language reference for a complete overview of the language. ↩︎
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