How many syllables does "cry" have?

I started out to make a program which finds out the number of syllables in a word, which is when I realized that I couldn't decide how many syllables cry consists of.

According to Wikipedia,

A unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without
surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word; e.g.,
there are two syllables in water and three in inferno

According to the above definition, cry does have 2 vowel sounds, so the number of syllables should be 2.

Technically, it should be 1, since there is a 'y' and no vowel.

I want to know what the community thinks about it.

Answer

It depends on who's saying it, and what idiolect they're speaking. Some people sometimes put an epenthetic shwa between /k/ and /r/ in /krai/ to break up the cluster, and/or make the /r/ syllabic, and and/or split the diphthong /ai/ into two pieces. And other times, they don't. It's not standard, sorry. It can vary from one to (in extreme cases, like the Johnnie Ray song) four or more.

Don't start with English writing, or you'll never get anywhere. Syllables are units of aural perception, not of writing; if you're still thinking of cry as containing a "Y", I'm afraid you're gonna hafta learn a whole lotta phonetics.

Start, if you must, with standard phonemic representations like the ones in Kenyon and Knott.