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

Multithreading

Concurrent programming is a significant theme when exploring Crystal. You can create lightweight threads (known as fibers) with the spawn method. By default, Crystal distributes work across a single CPU core using an asynchronous event loop. This is a simple and very efficient approach that relieves the programmer from dealing with thread synchronization and data races. When doing an I/O operation, only the current fiber is blocked; all others can run in the meantime. In most cases, scalability can be achieved by running multiple Crystal instances to take advantage of multiple cores. Concurrency will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8, Using External Libraries.

Nonetheless, there are cases when true multithreading becomes a need. For example, when working with CPU-intensive processing, having concurrent fibers isn't enough. Being able to run multiple fibers at once with parallelism is a must. For this, Crystal has an experimental flag, -Dpreview_mt,...