Ary Borenzweig 04 Sep 2015

Crystal 0.7.7 released!

Crystal 0.7.7 has been released!

This is a minor release with many improvements, such as:

New commiters

Starting from this release, the Crystal team has two new core commiters: Jonne Haß (jhass) and Julien Portalier (ysbaddaden).

Jonne started contributing to Crystal a long time ago. He built an IRC bot, written entirely in Crystal, which runs on our IRC chatroom. If you send “>> 1 + 2” in a channel where this bot is, it’ll reply with “3”. The bot originally compiled a Crystal program and ran it a sandbox, and told you the result of the expression. These days, it hits play.crystal-lang.org, which was also written by Jonne, in Crystal.

Jonne is always sending good pull requests and participates in most of the discussions surrounding the language, as well as giving helpful replies in our IRC chatroom. In a way, Jonne has always been part of the team, and only now he finally has commit grants :-)

Julien has been around for some time too. He contributed with many pull request, such as a huge one which basically refactored (in a very good way) the socket API. He’s the author of minitest.cr, a clone of Ruby’s minitest; prax.cr, a Rack proxy server for development; and shards, an alternative dependency manager.

This dependency manager, shards, is much better than Cyrstal’s built-in in many ways, and so we decided to integrate it into the compiler’s toolchain. So Julien will mostly be focusing on this task, although right now the work will remain on the shards repository until we decide the best way to integrate it in the language tools.

We are excited to have them in the team, and we hope you too!