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There is very little commercial use of Racket. I've used it several times to make little GUI apps to deploy on multiple platforms, and it excels at that. Proba

There is very little commercial use of Racket. I've used it several times to make little GUI apps to deploy on multiple platforms, and it excels at that. Probably the best way to think about the two of them is that Clojure is a focused language design, and the assumption is that you stay in the language and extend it with macros. Racket is an environment for generating languages. The assumption is that you will build language variants to do various tasks.

neilv 6y ago
Very little commercial use of Racket is maybe an understatement. A few notes to people thinking about commercial use of Racket... The big customer of my consulting business (public sector) did amazing "force multiplier" things with Racket and my help, even when many general-purpose libraries had to be built in-house. But there were virtually no other prospective clients in that niche after over a decade. There are a few organizations who use Racket to great production effect. But two problems for consulting&employment for those: * Their generally one-person teams could usually do everything that's needed, and perhaps some developers prefer that; * When they would like additional help, they generally didn't have the money/authority to pay HCOLA developers. I tried half-heartedly for a few years to promote the idea of doing one's startup prototype with Racket. But the browser-side and iOS&Android app stories aren't there yet. And my own startup, I self-funded too long before my co-founder and I realized we should've found a CEO to court funding months earlier. The startup where I currently lead engineering uses (for historical reasons) Python for server backend and for device interfacing on a light embedded system, and framework-like JS on one frontend, and interfaces with a SaaS for a different frontend. All the Python bits could've been done in Racket, and Racket would've been more productive and fun to work with, but it's not worth rewriting at this time. I recently prototyped a new embedded system frontend in Kivy, and was able to get a running GUI mockup nice in a few hours, but realized afterwards it would've been better with Racket's GUI toolkit. When I recently had to pick a method to do an iOS app that wasn't consumer-facing, I was tempted to use Gambit Scheme. But I decided on Swift and SwiftUI, to be safe, and so we'd have more experience with it for the next iOS app (consumer-facing, for a high-quality/prestige brand) that was more likely to need a more-native toolkit and APIs. That said, if someday I have a startup that uses Racket or another Scheme (or another fringe platform), I expect the platform appeal to help me attract a larger pool of higher-powered developers than I otherwise could. If you're considering using Racket for making money, one start is to participate in this low-traffic email list (which has some unusual conventions): https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/
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p_l 6y ago
There isn't a lot of commercial use, but there's some. Some of the more famous cases are game development for PS4, specifically Uncharted series and related from Naughty Dog studio. Some other places also do internal tooling in it (including John Carmack at Oculus)

neilv 6y ago

Very little commercial use of Racket is maybe an understatement. A few notes to people thinking about commercial use of Racket... The big customer of my consulting business (public sector) did amazing "force multiplier" things with Racket and my help, even when many general-purpose libraries had to be built in-house. But there were virtually no other prospective clients in that niche after over a decade. There are a few organizations who use Racket to great production effect. But two problems for consulting&employment for those: * Their generally one-person teams could usually do everything that's needed, and perhaps some developers prefer that; * When they would like additional help, they generally didn't have the money/authority to pay HCOLA developers. I tried half-heartedly for a few years to promote the idea of doing one's startup prototype with Racket. But the browser-side and iOS&Android app stories aren't there yet. And my own startup, I self-funded too long before my co-founder and I realized we should've found a CEO to court funding months earlier. The startup where I currently lead engineering uses (for historical reasons) Python for server backend and for device interfacing on a light embedded system, and framework-like JS on one frontend, and interfaces with a SaaS for a different frontend. All the Python bits could've been done in Racket, and Racket would've been more productive and fun to work with, but it's not worth rewriting at this time. I recently prototyped a new embedded system frontend in Kivy, and was able to get a running GUI mockup nice in a few hours, but realized afterwards it would've been better with Racket's GUI toolkit. When I recently had to pick a method to do an iOS app that wasn't consumer-facing, I was tempted to use Gambit Scheme. But I decided on Swift and SwiftUI, to be safe, and so we'd have more experience with it for the next iOS app (consumer-facing, for a high-quality/prestige brand) that was more likely to need a more-native toolkit and APIs. That said, if someday I have a startup that uses Racket or another Scheme (or another fringe platform), I expect the platform appeal to help me attract a larger pool of higher-powered developers than I otherwise could. If you're considering using Racket for making money, one start is to participate in this low-traffic email list (which has some unusual conventions): https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/

deleted 6y ago
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p_l 6y ago

There isn't a lot of commercial use, but there's some. Some of the more famous cases are game development for PS4, specifically Uncharted series and related from Naughty Dog studio. Some other places also do internal tooling in it (including John Carmack at Oculus)