Racket 5.1 Released

[mattmight]

Racket has been rocking my world lately.

In particular, I love that you can arbitrarily define (or redefine) patterns for the match construct using macros.

It leads to some damn elegant code:

http://matt.might.net/articles/red-black-delete/

http://matt.might.net/articles/parsing-with-derivatives/

[copper]

I played around (rather ineffectually) with David's Haskell code, back when the whole "Yacc is Dead" stuff was here, and I still tend to believe that Haskell results in less code when laziness is involved :)

That said, I think I really like define/fix

[gcr]

Summary for the impatient:

- A completely new GUI and drawing layer. Replacing 200,000 lines of C++, Xt, Win32, and Carbon with about 30,000 lines of Racket that builds on Gtk, Win32, Cocoa, Cairo, and Pango. Nice. - Web server changed semantics - Scribble documents can now hold any image - Module dependency tools

[prog]

Racket seems to be really neat with support for features like JIT and futures (which have been around before 5.1).

The other day I tried a simple benchmark (nothing elaborate - just fib) and found it to be significantly faster than Python. Unfortunately I don't have the numbers right now.

Does anyone have any experience to share regarding the use of Racket in a production app?

[mark_l_watson]

benchmark game comparison: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

Yes, Racket looks to be almost an order of magnitude faster on most of the benchmarks.

[robinhouston]

In case I'm not the only person who thought “What’s Racket?”, it’s the language formerly known as PLT Scheme. It was renamed last year.

[nuxi]

And, to everyone's surprise, the wiki page has not been marked for deletion yet. Doubleplus good.

[boskone]

Back using Racket after a long hiatus. Racket I never should have left you. There are but two languages I'll use. Racket and Scala.

[itgoon]

Ditto, only for Scheme in general (I used Chicken the last time around). I chose Racket this time for all the "batteries included" stuff.

I've never shipped anything written in Scheme, but my excursions into it have always left me a wiser programmer.