Crystal on OpenBSD 6.0

Not the most ideal way to install something on OpenBSD for various reasons. It will be great if there were packages already built for Crystal.

Pre-requisites

Install bash: doas pkg_add bash

OpenBSD comes with a default shell ksh. Crystal needs bash to run.

$ crystal
env: bash: No such file or directory

Installing the binary

Download the OpenBSD tarball from https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/releases. The latest version of Crystal available for OpenBSD is 0.19.4.

Extract it to where you store user downloaded binaries e.g. /usr/local or /opt

Link the binary to your path.

$ ln -sf /usr/local/crystal/bin/crystal /usr/local/bin/crystal

Making sure it works

Try running crystal to get the version:

$ crystal -v
Crystal 0.19.4 [7f82f79] (2016-10-07)

Create a Crystal program and run it.

/home/user/fib.cr
def fibonacci(n)
  return n if n <= 1
  fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)
end
puts fibonacci 40

$ vim fib.cr
$ crystal build --release fib.cr
$ time ./fib
102334155
    0m00.94s real     0m00.81s user     0m00.01s system

It runs pretty fast on my OpenBSD server. OpenBSD is not particularly fast versus other operating systems, choosing a fast programming language helps speed things up.

Published on 4 Dec 2016 by Stanley Tan

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