[HN Gopher] Racket Compiler and Runtime Status
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Racket Compiler and Runtime Status
Author : gleb_the_human
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-01-24 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.racket-lang.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.racket-lang.org)
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is nice to see. I've played around with Chez and Racket
| separately, and even though I'm now focusing on bare metal/JIT
| again, I look forward to using the new Racket.
| sitkack wrote:
| Interesting I was just looking at the Chez Scheme backends and
| didn't remember seeing aarch64, just 32 bit arm. And then I found
| this
|
| https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme/issues/545
|
| Racket-Chez is different from Cisco-Chez by > 600 commits. I
| wonder what the plan is to normalize them or will be Racket-Chez
| be our new house.
|
| https://github.com/racket/ChezScheme
| samth wrote:
| We (mostly Matthew) have opened plenty of pull requests,
| although not for the most recent changes since they rely on
| earlier ones that are not merged. The Chez maintainers move at
| a deliberate pace, and don't necessarily share all the same
| priorities as Racket. But we're very much in touch with them,
| and they've helped develop even some of the changes that aren't
| upstream.
|
| I don't think it's likely that we'll move back to pure upstream
| Chez in the near future, but it's not quite a fork either.
|
| You can read more about some of these issues in our ICFP 2019
| paper: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/rkt-on-chez/ which is co-
| authored with the Chez maintainers.
| [deleted]
| sachanganesh wrote:
| What is Racket primarily used for? I'm not sure where it fits in
| the language landscape in terms of strengths/weaknesses.
| stretchcat wrote:
| To me, it's the language I use when I want to have fun.
| desine wrote:
| It's a Lisp, in the Scheme subset. It's original design was
| primarily around Programming Language Theory education -
| formerly it was PLT Scheme. Much of it was designed for
| educational uses, but it's a really well-rounded system with
| plenty of packages, a decent package management system, better
| performance than most interpreted languages. It comes with an
| IDE easier to pick up for newbies than Emacs (the usual
| Lisp/Scheme environment), but also runs fine as a command line
| REPL and compiler.
|
| It's kind of an oddball. While the development focus is mostly
| educational, specifically Programming Language theory, it's
| also very usable in the real world. There's a few tutorials on
| writing your own domain specific language in it. You can
| specify a language other than the default Racket, so one
| compiler/interpreter environment actually supports many Lisps
| and DSLs.
|
| I'm a long time dev who recently picked up SICP to learn why
| everyone says learning Lisp/Scheme will make you a better
| programmer, and Racket is by far the most interesting
| environment I've worked in. I haven't even touched Python,
| which was my money-maker, in months.
| dTal wrote:
| I think of it as the Python of Scheme (yes yes I know).
| Batteries included, well documented, big focus on ease-of-use.
|
| It also has a Big Idea; it aims to be the practical realization
| of the grand idea that Lisps are the perfect platform to build
| programming languages on, and to take this so radically far
| that you can have entirely different programming languages that
| nevertheless share, not just a runtime, but _all their
| libraries_. Unfortunately, so far, nobody except Racket
| enthusiasts appear to have much interest in building languages
| on top of Racket - but it 's absolutely possible and practical,
| and someone really did accomplish the astonishing feat of
| implementing Python (Python 2, alas) in Racket, in such a way
| that you could combine libraries from both languages.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| I'm glad Racket CS happened(even though I don't use Racket),
| because I was worried about the future of chezscheme's
| maintenance. It's a runtime with good portability(Guile Scheme,
| for instance, seems to pretend Windows doesn't exist), and I
| think it'd be a shame to see it fade away in the future.
| DC1350 wrote:
| I used Racket in an intro to CS course a few years ago and was
| told it's designed to be a teaching language. Is there any reason
| to use racket over a more popular functional language? Does
| anyone use it in production?
| patrec wrote:
| Carmack would have used it for Oculus, had management not said
| no. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/807797812700348416
| soegaard wrote:
| The Racket distribution comes with several languages. You were
| probably using the socalled teaching languages, which are small
| subsets of real Racket. Using a subset of the real language
| allows better and more beginner friendly error messages.
|
| The real Racket language is a general purpose language with all
| the bells and whistles you could ever imagine.
| fantispug wrote:
| The killer feature of racket is it is very easy to make Domain
| Specific Languages (including the teaching language) and
| related tooling. However last time I looked the library
| ecosystem didn't seem great; there were many libraries but few
| that were actively maintained.
| behnamoh wrote:
| One could also argue that DSLs are not always good esp. in
| large projects maintained by many devs.
| gypsyharlot wrote:
| I am interested in LISP-type languages, but I have a serious case
| of decision paralysis.
|
| GNU Guile? Common Lisp? Clojure (JVM)? Racket? Judging by my
| understanding of the difference between Common Lisp and Scheme, I
| think I am more of a Scheme type (I prefer C over C++, I like Go
| more than Java, etc).
| yw3410 wrote:
| If you want live image reloading stick to a Lisp like SBCL
| rather than Scheme.
|
| If you care about startup times or FFI then don't pick Clojure.
|
| YMMV between Racket and Guile; I would say Racket is better
| insofar as the culture of documentation is really very good.
|
| In practice, once you learn a Lisp, you can jump between them
| without too much trouble.
| mepian wrote:
| SBCL is an implementation of Common Lisp, to be precise.
| There is also CCL, or Clozure Common Lisp, which has the best
| support for macOS.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I tend to enjoy Scheme more than Common Lisp for just hacking
| around, but I'm by no means an expert Lisp hacker. If you
| decide to check out Scheme though, Chicken Scheme has been
| awesome for me. It's very fast, compiles to C, had a ton of
| great "eggs" (modules / packages), and seems to have a somewhat
| friendly community with decent documentation.
| bjoli wrote:
| If you want batteries included and probably the nicest runtime
| of all the lisps I would suggest racket.
|
| I use guile since I think it more fun, but racket is a lot
| easier if you want libraries around.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| Racket really is nice if you don't know what you want to do
| and you want to be hacking on some code in less than five
| minutes. I think I have Racket installed on every computer I
| own.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I think the first question is scheme, or Common Lisp? The
| answer depends on what your style is. After trying both I like
| scheme better but I agonized over this decision for awhile,
| though I enjoy sbcl and CLISP is dear to my heart.
|
| In terms of schemes you have a wide variety to pick from.
| Gerbil, Racket, Gambit, Chez, Chicken and many more. Racket is
| a great all around choice. There are schemes that do various
| things better than it, but it can do most things well. It has
| two great edX courses to learn from (How to design simple data,
| and how to design complex data) and is how I initially learned.
|
| Chicken is one of my favorite schemes and is probably the one I
| would use if I wasn't using Racket. It's so portable since it
| compiles to C. I love the egg system, and I like the logo.
| Gerbil is a performant systems level scheme. I remember there
| being an article about someone in the Common Lisp community
| considering jumping to Racket, but ending up on Gerbil Scheme
| for what it's worth. I haven't used it
|
| Chez is another super performant scheme, and is actually the
| backend for the Racket programming language as seen in the
| article above. It was only open sourced a few years ago so it
| might be difficult to find solutions or get answers. I've used
| Guile, I appreciate the mission, but I found it wanting. I've
| heard people ship Gambit scheme apps onto IOS so if you are
| looking at mobile apps that might be the way to go, I'm sure
| Chicken could do that to. I have also heard that Gambits Cffi
| is one of the best in the business, so if you need to interface
| with a lot of C code that might be the way to go.
| desine wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat, and I am loving both Racket and Chicken
| Scheme
| fredrikholm wrote:
| Racket if you're interested in a more "pure" lisp and/or
| metaprogramming/DSLs.
|
| Clojure if you're looking to use the language directly to solve
| your problems (and my preferred Lisp).
| kogir wrote:
| If HN ends up moving to the CS runtime I'd love to hear a high
| level summary of what work it required and how the new runtime
| performs.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| You can run (what I suspect is an old version of) HN yourself:
| http://arclanguage.org/install
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Congrats on the release. What Racket really needs right now is a
| proper dependency manager with support for constraint solving and
| allowing multiple conflicting transitive dependencies. Cargo and
| yarn are the gold standard for this. A lot of Lisps tend to
| overly focus on language and compiler features and neglect the
| more boring tooling and infrastructure that makes a programming
| language successful.
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