Crystal was never able to find traction as a Ruby clone that could compete with C speeds. Why would a Python clone have any better luck? I don’t think anyone would accuse Python of being dramatically more usable than Ruby.
I think the appeal with Crystal is for users who already know Ruby, so the marked was already limited there.
Crystal itself is a gem, but comparing it to Mojo and its relation to Python is fair but gives the wrong message. Python is by far more popular becuse of all the packages, so the market is way larger there.
Well, for the domains Mojo targets, Python is king. So a faster-Python-like language would have more potential audiences. A fast Ruby-like language, not so much, as Ruby was never that special in those domains, or in most places outside web development, and even for that it kind of lost steam in the past 10 years.
Besides people opting for closer to C speed had Rust, Go, Java, Swift, and other options to go to, all with more momentum and support, before going for a yet unproven Ruby clone.
I used to be quite sceptical given how Swift for Tensorflow went, however since NVidia decided to partner with Modular, alongside their ongoing CUDA JIT bindings for Python, I think Mojo might actually work out.
Apparently it had Google's money backing, for what it is worth.
I never believed into it, because Swift is as relevant as Objective-C outside NeXT/Apple's platforms, and not the kind of programming language that the research community cares about.
> Mojo is still early and not yet a Python superset, so only simple programs can be brought over as-is with no code changes. We will continue investing in this and build migration tools as the language matures.
From someone who would love for Crystal to be the answer here, because of its fantastic concurrency features: It is a bit of a non-starter because of excessive compile times for larger projects. Also, they hadn't solved the cross-compilation issue last time I checked.
