I've wanted to develop desktop UIs that look professional and are lightweight, and I wonder if Racket, with its built-in UI framework, could be a good choice.
I did try it once but the hello world app was already really heavy (200MB of RAM instantly taken , if I remember correctly), but maybe I did something wrong (debug mode perhaps??)
Can I package a Racket app with a MacOS installer and sign it? How about Windows and Linux?
If you want to see some "real world" high quality Racket GUI stuff this is the place to go. Very inspiring. I'd love to do more with Racket & its GUI lib.
#lang racket/base
(require racket/draw pict racket/gui/base racket/class)
;; avoiding pulling in to many extra deps so have to redefine some useful functions
(define (first lst)
(car lst))
(define (second lst)
(cadr lst))
(define (third lst)
(caddr lst))
(define (false? val)
(not val))
Thankfully after creating a basic frame and canvas, the jumps haven't been as big, but I could easily see the program going to 400M by the time it's done. I will download Racket 8.0 today and see how it performs
I think once Gerbil scheme becomes more mature I'll do more work in that. It's faster, smaller, and borrows a lot of things from Racket that I like.
*EDIT* I installed racket 8.0 (super easy and removed the old installation as well!) and compiled my program. Compiling it and running it results in it going from 280M down to 220M, That's a 27% improvement. Creating an exe brings the memory usage back to 243M but that's still down. I'm less familiar with creating exes so there might be some settings I can tweak.
As for debug mode, you should AOT compile with 'raco make' to run a fair test.