Racket v8.2 | Hacker News Reader

Racket v8.2

blog.racket-lang.org

114 pointstodsacerdoti20 comments

As someone who did my first CS course in HtDP, it's nice to see new versions like this. Looks like the community is active and lively too.

Which makes me curious...outside of teaching and PL research, is anyone else using Racket? Has it been used in other CS research fields perhaps? Some of the items in this changeset makes me think it might be used in numeric computation/stats modelling. Is it seeing some use in the industry as well? It seems to have a pretty extensive ecosystem but are the libraries mature?

Would love to hear what/how people have been using Racket.

I use it for quick scripts. I do offensive security. It's a pleasant option when doing things other pentesters would do in Python or Go.

>It seems to have a pretty extensive ecosystem but are the libraries mature?

If you're just doing API calls, file IO, simple networking, then it's more than you'll ever need. If I'm doing something obscure enough to have to worry 'is there a mature library for this in Racket?' I'll just use Python at that point.

AFAIK HN itself runs on Arc (http://arclanguage.org/), which is implemented in Racket (formerly in PLT). Does that count?

Edit: in addition, I used PLT (Racket's predecessor) for my own scientific computing needs, e.g., plotting, providing a front end to simulators written in C, etc. I didn't make the switch to Racket because it broke a lot of code and I didn't have time to rewrite everything. Limped along until Julia became a thing, and now that's what I use. And yes, could have (and did) use Python, but I really prefer writing Scheme to Python when possible.

I used Racket for bioinformatics research maybe 8 years ago a big hospital. Never seen it used outside of academia though really.

Using it for maybe five years as my primary language for tools, simulators, testing embedded devices, games, etc. compared to common lisp, clojure, etc. it’s just less overhead for modules, packaging, compiling to executables... I would love to move more into common lisp but it seems like 20 steps to create a binary in the foss world, and expensive to do so in the Allegro/LispWorks world. Happy to pay for dev tools, but paying to distribute your program? No thanks.

I don't think you have to pay to distribute in LispWorks, beyond buying the full license, did that change?

I may have mixed up the two, but one of Allegro or Lispworks mentioned additional licensing. Or I might have mistook the required license upgrade if you distribute, for a run-time license.

I use it for simple cross platform graphical applications.

I'm using Racket for a small site for T.A. in my department (~500). They can select which class to go the next semester.

Yes, several companies are using Racket.

https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki/Organizations-using-Ra...

the biggest adoption it would have gotten is that it was going to be used the main language of vrscripting https://youtu.be/ydyztGZnbNs but it seems like john couldnt push it everyone into it

I'm really surprised and impressed by some of the huge changes this language family has passed through. From mzscheme to Racket, then to Racket on Chez Scheme — that these changes didn't kill it is a testament to the care with which the implementation was done and the transitions were planned.

IIRC in the mzscheme to Racket there was some renaming of function [like hash-table-get -> hash-ref] and other not back compatible stuff.

The transition to Racket on Chez Scheme was easier for users because the new version is bug compatible with the old one. (There may be some difference in corner cases, but most of them are bug and get fixed. Anyway, I think there are still some details in the ffi and the heuristic of the garbage collector that are impossible to fix.)

In the switch from "PLT Scheme"/mzscheme to Racket backwards compatibility was almost entirely maintained, you can still use `mzscheme` or `#lang scheme`.

There were some substantial backwards-incompatible changes before that (~10-15 years ago). For example, revamping the exception hierarchy, moving to immutable pairs, and re-doing the class system.

Can anyone tell me why Racket requires 900Mb of disk space? It's just a Lisp when all's said and done.

It comes with lot of libraries and a compiler, not sure if it's the reason

I am not at my main computer at the moment so I can't confirm yet, but IIRC Racket is available as a much smaller language core set of tools sufficient to run CLI scripts.

I consider Racket to be a "batteries included", curated distribution of the Racket lang CLI tools, plus a lot of libraries, including libraries for GUI development. Lots of documentation and the IDE.

The TeXLive distribution might be somewhat analogous; billions of bytes of fonts and GUI apps, a package manager...

https://www.tug.org/texlive/

The full installation includes an IDE, a documentation system, a web server, a bunch of graphical games, a slide presentation program, significant educational software, and more, plus thousands of pages of docs. If you want a smaller program to install, the Minimal Racket distribution will use much less space, and is still a full-featured Lisp.

Adding more details: To download the minimal version: https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/8.2/

The installer is 1/5 of the full version. I'm too lazy to install both side by side to see the amount of disk after installation.

Also, once the minimal version is installed, it's possible to add some of the packages to get a custom intermediate version, or even just add all the packages and get the full version.

it doesn't, https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/racket/ according to arch its ~500MB. The installer is ~200 but unpacked is all the documentation and etc. The switch to Chez Scheme backend has upped the size because it no longer outputs bytecode but machinecode directly

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