Book Image

Crystal Programming

By : George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal
Book Image

Crystal Programming

By: George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal

Overview of this book

Crystal is a programming language with a concise and user-friendly syntax, along with a seamless system and a performant core, reaching C-like speed. This book will help you gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of Crystal and show you how to apply them to create various types of applications. This book comes packed with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples. You'll learn how to use Crystal’s features to create complex and organized projects relying on OOP and its most common design patterns. As you progress, you'll gain a solid understanding of both the basic and advanced features of Crystal. This will enable you to build any application, including command-line interface (CLI) programs and web applications using IOs, concurrency and C bindings, HTTP servers, and the JSON API. By the end of this programming book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to use Crystal programming for building and understanding any application you come across.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
5
Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
10
Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
13
Part 4: Metaprogramming
18
Part 5: Supporting Tools

Distributing your binary

The simplest form of distribution would be to add the binary we built in the previous section to the assets of the release. This would allow anyone to download and run it, assuming a binary existed for their OS/architecture combination. The binary we created in the previous section would work on any computer using the same underlying OS and architecture that it was compiled on – in this case, x86_64 Linux. Other CPU architectures/OSs, such as macOS and Windows, would need dedicated binaries.

Via Docker

Another common way to distribute your binary is by including it within a Docker image that could then be used directly. The portable nature of Crystal makes creating these images easy. We can also leverage multi-stage builds to build the binary in an image that contains all the required dependencies, but then extract it into a more minimal image for distribution. The resulting Dockerfile for this process could look like this:

FROM crystallang...