Wow! Ruby was the first programming language I learnt and I still love it. Crystal is going to add features I've always missed: static typing and compilation. Thank you guys, it will be awesome!
You missed compilation?
He probably meant the results of compilation: superfast binaries ;)
Many Lisps have had compilation to binaries. But having a binary doesn't imply being faster than an interpreted language.
Theoretically, a JIT optimization can end up with faster code than an AOT optimizer can produce, thanks to runtime profiling.
In fact, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks, which Crystal is probably not ready to share, but may have conducted: https://github.com/manastech/crystal/blob/master/samples/fan...
Edit: this[0] seems to indicate that the optimizations are in the same ballpark as Go and D, which is really impressive.