Racket v9.2
blog.racket-lang.org
blog.racket-lang.org
See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/05/racket-v9-2.html for the release announcement and highlights.
If you are using rackup you can upgrade with `rackup upgrade`
Don’t forget to migrate your packages with raco pkg migrate 9.1
Scheme is a wonderful lisp dialect. It taught me basics of functional programming, about closures, about tail call recursion, about functions always returning values (which annoyed me a lot when I started learning Python, where .append or .sort returened `none` instead of the list, and were destructive).
So I have very fond memories of Racket (then DrScheme) and Scheme. Had also written my matrix multiplication library and my CAS system to mimic the functionality of my HP28s calculator.
Have to look into it again.
I have been writing Elixir professionally for the bulk of my career. (It’s been pretty awesome!) Despite this, I consider Racket to be my native language because it’s so easy for me to think in Racket. It’s the perfect bridge between my brain and the problem domain.
But it's really hard to give up the raw power of Common Lisp and ability to write low-level code. Even if the language and tooling is all more complicated.
I did start to feel Racket’s “wordiness” towards the end - it started to feel a bit like COBOL. I’ve since moved onto Clojure and really appreciate the shorter keywords/function names/fewer parenthesis.
I still miss for/fold though - that thing is an absolute machine.
That said, while I didn’t learn content from it, the exposition of their process was excellent. It really influenced my “personal software process” a lot. Also, it gave me a lot of tools for informal postmortems that I reach for when mentoring junior colleagues.
The book’s taxonomy of the different kinds of recursion helped me see what others found difficult about it.
Background: I liked SICP but HtDP made it easier to see the content as one unified subject instead of a bunch of tricky/interesting individual exercises.
I recently picked up Essentials of Compilation by Jeremy Siek, perhaps his book and lectures will make something click for me.
In the meantime Julia has been my happy medium for a “lisp”.
It was the first mainstream attempt to an ALGOL style Lisp.
https://opendylan.org/documentation/index.html
Pity it didn't went down well at Apple.
At $dayjob I'm using it to test what novel geometries of deep learning models would look like. Being able to redefine any part of the stack for any reason is a superpower you don't know you need until you do.
A great place to start is the little learner which holds your hand until you get opinionated about what the underlying primitives should look like. E.g. what if we used sparse tensor representation?
That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.
I think you're trying to imply you're inventing something new and racket enables you to explore... But what I read (as someone with a PhD in deep learning that has worked on sparsity) is you actually don't know the prior art and you're using racket as an excuse to reinvent a whole bunch of stuff that already exists in plenty of mature libraries in more mundane languages (including python/pytorch). Which is of course fine for personal growth but please don't oversell racket as a "superpower" - to wit I can manipulate any part of my stack too because it's all written in cpp.
It took me 20 minutes.
Tell me how you'd do that in cpp?
>Unlike their binary counterparts, posits and takums, tekums simultaneously accommodate both ∞ and NaR, while retaining the simplicity of negation by flipping the underlying trit string. Perhaps most strikingly, tekums enable rounding by truncation, a property that eradicates at a stroke some notorious problems of rounding in binary arithmetic: double rounding errors, cascading carries in hardware, and the attendant inefficiencies.
Yes I can read very well - can you?
> ... by storing them in the corresponding uint
And that once you can store them you need to write custom functions that do bitwise manipulation on those arbitrary blocks of memory?
The stuff that's done in hardware for you on all binary fp?
Meanwhile in racket I got arbitrary balanced ternary manista and exponent precision in less time it took to write this post. Something that not available in C/Cpp even for binary fp?
Yes what part of my response to you gave you the impression that I did not?
> Meanwhile in racket I got arbitrary balanced ternary manista and exponent precision in less time it took to write this post.
Your claim was that it could not be done in cpp, not that it was faster/simpler/whatever-new-goalpost-you're-now-presenting in racket.
> less time it took to write this post
An interpreted language with a runtime and a GC is easier to use than a systems language? I think this novel discovery is worth a turing award indeed! I'll be sure to refer you for one. Maybe even an honorary doctorate at my alma mater.
You need to reread the reply they made. They asked how you would do it in cpp, not that it’s not possible.
> I think this novel discovery is worth a turing award indeed! I'll be sure to refer you for one. Maybe even an honorary doctorate at my alma mater.
You could have made your point sufficiently without being condescending.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/lush-my-favori...
As such pretty much all numerical optimisations are useless for my work. Racket however chugs along happily, if slowly.