Those functional languages don't have function overloading or named arguments. The type inference in Crystal works very differently. The type of a method can only be computed from explicit calls to it. In those functional languages the type can be computed independent of a call because it's trivial to do so if a function name always refers to a single entity.
"Fast as C" should maybe be changed to something else. Crystal can bind directly to C functions and libraries without any overhead, plus you have pointers and other stuff. So you could really write code that runs as fast as C if you program like in C, but with Crystal syntax. That's where the tagline comes from. But of with course normal usage of the language, with its heap-allocated stuff, garbage collector and usual stuff (like Array#map, which does allocate a new array), you won't get performance like C, but it will be acceptable, and usually faster than dynamic/interpreted languages.
The compiler takes about 30 seconds or a bit more to compile, and it has around 50000 lines of code. Do you have the few hundred lines that took you 30+s to compile?
I can't send the full code atm, but it basically just fetches json from an endpoint, stores it in memory, and returns it in a different format on an http endpoint
My point of view is that while developing you don't need the `--release` flag, so you can get a more or less fluent experience. The few times where you need to release an app it takes longer, but for me that's acceptable.
I always like flipping on the release flag at then end of my work day. I treat it like a stopping point in my code, where I get to see how fast it is compared to the slow running debug executables I’d been working with all day. Great way to end a coding session.
I rarely notice the difference between release and debug executables unless i'm benchmarking or doing something super CPU heavy. I've so far deployed most of my crystal apps in debug mode because it makes the stack traces nicer because of the lack of aggressive inlining.
