Laravel users are no doubt familiar with the Homestead VM project that makes it quick and easy to get new sites up and running. In this new post to his site, project maintainer Joe Ferguson covers some changes made to run something besides a PHP framework: a Crystal project.

A few days ago a random internet stranger (Rid) showed up in the Larachat Slack #homestead-dev room. This is about the best real time chat support for Homestead. Rid proceeds to ask about building something like Homestead for the framework he was working on called Lucky for the [Crystal programming language](https://crystal-lang.org/). After we chatted about Vagrant and Docker I mentioned that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get supported in Homestead. Rid shared some helpful URLs and I was off to the races.

Joe mentions that the next Homestead box will come configured to support this out of the box but also provides instructions if you'd like to set it up before that. The Cyrstal language is inspired by Ruby and is designed to be as "fast as C".

On the php|architect blog today Bill Karwin looks at a new library - Crystal - a database library to help make it simpler to work with SQL (and make it more human-readable).

Martin [Rusev]’s project is called Crystal. It’s an object-oriented wrapper for the venerable mysql and pg extensions, with the goals of making SQL more human-readable, and providing a library that is lightweight and easy to learn.

There's code examples on the site of how to use the library. Bill also mentions some of the things the project does well and a few things it doesn't - like leaving out some of the advanced SQL functionality in favor of simplicity. He also mentions concerns about SQL injection handling, code not shared between database handlers and the unfinished nature of some features.