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Comment by emmanueloga_ | Hacker News Reader

I wish the team did away with Dr Racket... It does have some unique features but I feel like it adds megabytes to the whole package and is not really very usable for anything other than learning (imho). I've seen this acknowledged by the Racket docs I think (the fact that it is supposed to be a learning environment).

I suspect Racket would be a lot more popular as a development environment if the team did away with Dr Racket and put those resources into maintaining a very solid Emacs, Vim and VS Code integration.

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> I wish the team did away with Dr Racket... It does have some unique features but I feel like it adds megabytes to the whole package

Just download the 'Minimal Racket' build instead. ~10MB instead of 100+

> I suspect Racket would be a lot more popular as a development environment if the team did away with Dr Racket and put those resources into maintaining a very solid Emacs, Vim and VS Code integration.

I think racket/gui would suffer if they stopped working on Dr Racket, which would be a shame.

racket doesn't have any less of a solid integration into emacs (racket-mode) and visual studio code (magic racket) than most other languages.

I don't think this is true. I don't think racket-mode has a big community around it, and sadly doesn't come even close to slime [1] or cider [2], both very feature full dev envs for Emacs.

Magic racket is very bare bones and can't compare to integrations like Calva [3].

So I saw someone down voted me... just to be clear, I use Racket despite having to work against a poor tooling experience, when comparing to say, CL or Clojure.

I want Racket to succeed in industry, so is not like I'm complaining. I'm pointing out what I think is a weakness, maybe a blind spot by the team, since they seem to be very attached to Dr Racket!

1: https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/

2: https://cider.mx/

3: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva

Have you checked the new features recently?

https://www.racket-mode.com/

So part of the problem is that racket mode has a bus factor of 1. I saw that the maintainer posted this [1] a while ago, which is a bit concerning.

My point is that would be ideal if the core Racket team also participated in polishing the IDE integrations, other than Dr Racket.

1: https://www.greghendershott.com/2019/07/future-of-racket.htm...

On the other hand, I've just spent several more-or-less full-time months taking advantage of the drracket/check-syntax library, provided by the core Racket team.

On the third hand, I spent all that time, so wrt "bus factor 1", there will be no pleasing you. :)

Just avoid buses please :-p

Thanks for all your work on the racket ecosystem!

Magic Racket author here. On one hand, it’s difficult to see such a big time investment into DrRacket and not think about what could have been if so many man-hours went into the language server instead...

But on the other hand, many things from DrRacket can be reused as modules in the language server, so the work that goes into it is not “lost” for the ones that don’t use it directly.

Also, what’s the biggest feature you miss from Magic Racket (and the language server by extension)? As far as I’m aware, the language server project doesn’t have a fixed set of goals and it grows rather organically. Maybe they would make use of this kind of feedback.

My first and only experience with MagicRacket was trying to run EOPL's code [1] (and failing), I filled this bug [1] and haven't tried again yet.

Should MR work fine with other langs? I don't think it is stated on the docs anywhere if this is a supported feature. For instance, if I open a .scm (Scheme) file, Ctrl-P to switch to lang (MR mode) and launch a REPL, is it supposed to work fine?

1: https://github.com/mwand/eopl3

2: https://github.com/Eugleo/magic-racket/issues/13

It should be fixed. Magic Racket works with other #langs as much as racket-langserver doe. That means, AFAIK, that if the #lang is configured correctly to work with DrRacket, it should work with the langserver as well.

you know, i actually take back my statement to a degree. i agree with you, especially on the examples you provided.

what i was thinking of is most languages. having used various ides for python, elixir, and f#, i have been rather unimpressed with IDE offerings from these languages. dr. racket is indeed nice and easy to use but is rather frustratingly un-performant. clojure's IDEs look so nice and clojure is very enticing, but i just don't want to live on the jvm and in java land.

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