Crystal's interpreter – A very special holiday present

[NewsBot]

A new Crystal blog post/announcement has been posted!

The awaited Crystal interpreter has been merged. To use it, you need to compile Crystal with a special flag and, at the time of writing, the official releases (.deb, .rpm, docker images, etc.) are not being compiled with it.

This post doubles as a F.A.Q. for this special feature. Let’s start from the very beginning:

Why Crystal needs an interpreter

While many will find this obvious, it’s useful to point out two specific features that an interpreter might enable:

1. In principle an interpreter should start executing code faster, since the codegen phase is skipped (see below), allowing to quickly test the result of some code without needing to recompile. It should be noted that the interpreter is quick for short programs that need to run only once, but compiled mode provides much more performance and should be preferred for most production us...

Get the full details here: Crystal's interpreter – A very special holiday present - The Crystal Programming Language