I spent a few days writing a satellite ground station daemon in Crystal, with an empty dependency list and a hard rule against third-party code. It works, it ships as one file, and it sits at 1.9 MB of memory at rest.
This is what the language was like to use, and what it cost.
The project is kozai: it reads orbital elements, propagates them with SGP4/SDP4, predicts passes over a ground station, serves a JSON API and an offline web interface, and drives a rotator and a radio through hamlib. About 9,000 lines of source and 6,400 lines of specs, on Crystal 1.21.0. None of that matters here except as the load under which the language was tested — this is a report on the tool, not on the satellites.
What the language actually delivers
The headline claim of a compiled language with a garbage collector is that you get Ruby's ergonomics and a binary at the end. In 2026 that claim holds, and the numbers are the part worth quoting:
