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

Transforming multiple files concurrently

At present, the application supports file input, but only from a single file. A valid use case could be to provide multiple files and create a new file with the transformed data for each one. Given the transformation logic is IO-bound, doing this concurrently makes sense and should lead to better performance.

The reason why IO-bound logic and concurrency go so well together is because of the Crystal scheduler. When a fiber gets to a point in its execution where it is dependent on some piece of data from an IO, the scheduler is able to seamlessly put that fiber to the side until that data has arrived.

A more concrete example of this in action would be to look at how the standard library's HTTP::Server functions. Each request is handled in its own fiber. Because of this, if another HTTP request needs to be made during the processing of a request, such as to get data from an external API, Crystal would be able to continue to process...