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Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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 using Racket for a small site for T.A. in my department (~500). They can select which class to go the next semester.

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

I use it for simple cross platform graphical applications.

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