title: Anybody tried the Crystal Programming Language (machine-code compiled Ruby)?
body: <p>Like many others, I always hold true that "A pure compiler will never exist for Ruby because the language is far too dynamic for a static compiler to work."</p>
  
  <p>But I recently stumbled upon these:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://github.com/manastech/crystal" rel="noreferrer">The Crystal programming language at GitHub</a></p>
  
  <p><a href="http://whitequark.org/blog/2011/12/21/statically-compiled-ruby/" rel="noreferrer">Statically compiled Ruby</a></p>
  
  <p>Both projects seem to be very interesting. They could give us the speed of a native-compiled language (and the often commercially-required, obfuscated code of a compiled language) while keeping all (or most) of the elegance and flexibility of Ruby. Add a good support library (or, more likely, the possibility to access the existing C++ libraries) and you can easily understand why this stuff could be interesting.</p>
  
  <p>Has anybody tried the Crystal language?
  (I didn't yet, because of compilation problems with ruby-llvm)</p>
  
  <p>Which was his/her feeling about it?</p>
  
  <p>Do you think that, given those design choices, would it be actually possible to develop a native-code (machine-code) compiler for Ruby (with a reasonable effort and in a reasonable amount of time)? Would it be <em>meaningful</em>?</p>