Chapter 3: Writing Your First Crystal Program
Okay! Let’s get down to it: in order to call yourself an “X Programmer,” you must write “Hello, world” in X. So let’s do it. Open up a text file: I’ll use
vim because I’m that kind of guy, but use whatever you want. Crystal programs end in .cr:$ vim hello.cr
Put this in it:
puts "Hello World!"
And run it with
crystal command:$ crystal hello.cr
Hello World!
It should run and print the output without error. If you get one, double check that you have the double quotation marks. Errors look like this:
$ crystal hello.cr
Syntax error in ./hello.cr:1: unterminated char literal, use double quotes for strings
puts 'Hello World!'
By the way
crystal command is great for quickly running your code but it’s slow. Each time it compiles and runs your program Let’s see how much does it takes to run that program.$ time crystal hello.cr
crystal hello.cr 0.30s user 0.20s system 154% cpu 0.326 total
0.326 seconds for a
Hello World? Now that’s slow.Instead of compiling and running again you can compile it to native code with the
buildcommand.$ crystal build hello.cr
And to run your program, do the Usual UNIX Thing:
$ time ./hello
./hello 0.00s user 0.00s system 87% cpu 0.006 total
You should see “Hello, world.” print to the screen 50x faster :) Congrats!