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

Chapter 6: Concurrency

In some scenarios, a program might need to handle the processing of multiple chunks of work, such as summing the number of lines in a series of files. This is a perfect example of the type of problem that Concurrency can help to solve by allowing the program to execute chunks of work while waiting on others. In this chapter, we will learn how concurrency works in Crystal and cover the following topics:

  • Using fibers to complete work concurrently
  • Using channels to communicate data safely
  • Transforming multiple files concurrently

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to understand the differences between concurrency and parallelism, how to use fibers to handle multiple concurrent tasks, and how to use channels to properly share data between fibers. Together, these concepts allow for the creation of programs that can multitask, resulting in more performant code.