The Crystal's language syntax is inspired by Ruby, the language is statically type-checked but does not require that the type of variables or method arguments be specified.

The language has the following goals: (1) have the same syntax as Ruby, or at least as similar as possible; (2) statically type-checked but without having to specify the type of variables or method arguments; (3) be able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal; (4) have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code; (5) compile to efficient native code.