3 ms·

sbcl is a workhorse. I wonder if the Racket folks didn't consider the Arc under production workloads general purpose enough to fix. I actually don't know of any

sbcl is a workhorse. I wonder if the Racket folks didn't consider the Arc under production workloads general purpose enough to fix. I actually don't know of any other projects that use Racket in anger I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Armed Bear because that JVM library ecosystem is enormous https://github.com/armedbear/abcl https://github.com/armedbear/abcl

dang 1y ago
The Racket folks have always been most helpful and never turned down a request to fix anything.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  Apologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users
  - brobdingnagians 1y ago
    My assumption is that creating a compiler and runtime to match sbcl isn't in scope for racket, so it wouldn't be polite to request racket to do so :) there were probably other benefits of similar orthogonal features, where racket users don't necessarily need it, but another language/runtime already has it because that's where people who need that go
    - BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
      Isn't Racket using the (also) very fast Chez Scheme underneath?
      - cess11 1y ago
        SBCL is disgustingly performant, and while Racket is fine for most applications you'll still notice sometimes that it's executed on a VM and hasn't prioritised speed to the same degree.
        lemming 1y ago
        Chez compiles, I think, its not a VM. It’s not as fast as SBCL of course, but it’s not interpreted.
        cess11 1y ago
        It's what they consistently call it here, VM and bytecode: https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html As I understand it the difference between raco make and raco exe is that the latter bundles a VM. I don't really care about these minutiae, it's a great platform for GUI development that consistently builds as well on Debian as Windows.
        fuzztester 1y ago
        >it's s a great platform for GUI development Can you elaborate on that? I'm interested in deciding on a good tech stack for desktop GUI app development for personal projects, so was interested in your comment.
        cess11 1y ago
        Sure. There is a rather extensive toolkit that comes with the basic distribution, https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/. For that you can use MrEd to build your layouts if you want, https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer. The problem with that approach is that you need to figure out some parts on your own, like state management. If you need that flexibility it's still a good option, or you'd opt for gui-easy, a library on top of the GUI toolkit that adds observables for state management and a more declarative API, https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html. I haven't managed to get cross-compilation going but I've had no problem just copying my Racket files to another computer and build there. It's supposed to be possible however, you'll probably manage to figure it out if it's important to you. The gui-easy library makes it trivial to pack up some small tool in a GUI in a few tens of lines of code. I'm guessing there is a way to prune the binaries but don't really care about it myself, I just go with the default ~20 MB executables.
  - samth 1y ago
    The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at. (Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tejtm 1y ago
As "in anger" is only something I have seen in the biomedical community, mediKanran should tick the box. https://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper7.pdf https://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper7....

dang 1y ago

The Racket folks have always been most helpful and never turned down a request to fix anything.

mdaniel 1y ago
Apologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users
- brobdingnagians 1y ago
  My assumption is that creating a compiler and runtime to match sbcl isn't in scope for racket, so it wouldn't be polite to request racket to do so :) there were probably other benefits of similar orthogonal features, where racket users don't necessarily need it, but another language/runtime already has it because that's where people who need that go
  - BoingBoomTschak 1y ago
    Isn't Racket using the (also) very fast Chez Scheme underneath?
    - cess11 1y ago
      SBCL is disgustingly performant, and while Racket is fine for most applications you'll still notice sometimes that it's executed on a VM and hasn't prioritised speed to the same degree.
      - lemming 1y ago
        Chez compiles, I think, its not a VM. It’s not as fast as SBCL of course, but it’s not interpreted.
        cess11 1y ago
        It's what they consistently call it here, VM and bytecode: https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html As I understand it the difference between raco make and raco exe is that the latter bundles a VM. I don't really care about these minutiae, it's a great platform for GUI development that consistently builds as well on Debian as Windows.
        fuzztester 1y ago
        >it's s a great platform for GUI development Can you elaborate on that? I'm interested in deciding on a good tech stack for desktop GUI app development for personal projects, so was interested in your comment.
        cess11 1y ago
        Sure. There is a rather extensive toolkit that comes with the basic distribution, https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/. For that you can use MrEd to build your layouts if you want, https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer. The problem with that approach is that you need to figure out some parts on your own, like state management. If you need that flexibility it's still a good option, or you'd opt for gui-easy, a library on top of the GUI toolkit that adds observables for state management and a more declarative API, https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html. I haven't managed to get cross-compilation going but I've had no problem just copying my Racket files to another computer and build there. It's supposed to be possible however, you'll probably manage to figure it out if it's important to you. The gui-easy library makes it trivial to pack up some small tool in a GUI in a few tens of lines of code. I'm guessing there is a way to prune the binaries but don't really care about it myself, I just go with the default ~20 MB executables.
- samth 1y ago
  The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at. (Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tejtm 1y ago

As "in anger" is only something I have seen in the biomedical community, mediKanran should tick the box. https://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper7.pdf https://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper7....