Said it before and I'll say it again:

I love the look of Crystal [I've always been a fan of Ruby's syntax] but I'm completely put off by:

1: Lack of decent tooling [C'mon. Any language which doesn't have a full-featured VScod[e/ium] extension by now isn't going to attract many people who want a modern IDE to work in!]

2: Unfriendly error mesages. When I have dabbled with Crystal in the past, I've nearly always had to look up error message to find what they actually mean, in terms those unfamiliar with the inner nuts & bolts of the language would understand.

It may be [deservedly?] much maligned. But I think V sets the bar for error messages. The V compiler tells you what's wrong in plain language and often suggests ways you could fix it. Crystal could learn a lot from V here.

3: Compile times are still far too slow. Rust is generally criticised for having glacial compile times. But has the "if it compiles it will be safe" defence as mitigation. Crystal's compile times aren't that bad. But they're a lot slower than [for example] Go and V.

No.3 I could put up with, if no.s 1 and 2 were given some love. But, overall I'm just not attracted to investing time in learning Crystal, while it has these down sides.