

Racket 5.1 Released - gcr
http://blog.racket-lang.org/2011/02/racket-v51.html

======
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...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=racket&lang2=python)

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.

