And you had a ton of experience with Ruby heading into this comparative exercise?
I feel like a lot of us are hitting a point in our career where we have decades of experience doing it one way, and learning something new is slow, but make the mistake of thinking that's entirely a reflection on that new thing. (Myself included.)
Yes, I used to be a seasoned Ruby dev myself, not so much as I'd like these days.
I had of course no previous experience with Crystal or Rust whatsoever. The trickiest point with Crystal was mapping the JSON dynamic payload to a typed structure to be parsed, modified and sent back. On top of strong typing, Rust added its particular syntax and lifetime complexities.
It was a fun side project and, performance wise, being it deployed in Heroku and so on, I didn't get any clear advantage between Crystal and Rust because everything was just doing a couple of network calls to a CouchDB endpoint with minimal modifications to the payload.
I wanted to share this as anecdotal evidence for Ruby developers. Coming from other languages, the developer experience would arguably be different.
I feel like a lot of us are hitting a point in our career where we have decades of experience doing it one way, and learning something new is slow, but make the mistake of thinking that's entirely a reflection on that new thing. (Myself included.)