On: Racket is 25

[mark_l_watson]

I used Racket a lot about 2 months ago. I was prototyping an application [1] in three different languages: Racket, LispWorks Common Lisp, and Swift.

Racket produces standalone applications that can be codesigned using Apple's tools, in preparation for their App Store.

Best regards to the Racket team.

[1] http://www.knowledgegraphnavigator.com/

[mjcohen → mark_l_watson]

I read co-designed instead of code-signed. Took me a bit to make sense of it.

[threepio → mark_l_watson]

> Racket produces standalone applications that can be codesigned using Apple's tools

Can you elaborate on how this works? I've been wanting to try something similar.

[mark_l_watson → threepio]

My codesigning notes for Racket

Build an application, unpack the .dmg file, add my own data files, create a new subdirectory with same name and move all files into it, discard the dmg, use Disk Utility to build a new .dmg and sign it:

codesign --force --deep --options runtime -s mark@mydomain.com -v New.dmg

Note: my app had required data files, which complicated the process.

[fiddlerwoaroof → mark_l_watson]

I’ve figured out a somewhat automatic way to do the dmg bundling which may be of interest:

https://github.com/cjdev/aws-access/blob/master/Makefile#L26

The manifest file used is here:

https://github.com/cjdev/aws-access/blob/master/dmg.json

It’s a bit annoying because it requires having a working node installation, but I found the whole process of building and configuring a dmg much too manual and undocumented to not use some kind of utility for.

[samth → threepio]

https://defn.io/2020/01/04/remember-internals/ describes some of this.

[dorfsmay → mark_l_watson]

Out of the 3, which one did you stick with? Racket?

Could you give a quick overview of the reasoning behind your final decision?

[bjoli → dorfsmay]

I can't reply for Mark, but the commercial lisps have a development experience that is hard to match. When using CLOS you get an extra smalltalky experience which the other CL implementations lack. And the debuggers are superior in just about every way.

Racket is nice and all that, but the commercial CLs are just that: commercial, aimed at people writing large programs with very high demands.

Anecdote: I once hit a weird bug when trying to get a very old CL program running. Nothing big, but once in a blue moon I would get the wrong result. I spent 3 days banging my head angainst it, trying to find a way to trigger it reliably. I inspected the live environment, did print-debigging. A friend encountered the same bug when running the program in Allegro CL and managed to debug it within minutes.

[mark_l_watson → dorfsmay]

LispWorks Common Lisp. I have always liked Common Lisp better. LispWorks costs $3400 and Racket is obviously free.

I usually recommend Racket when someone, at least right now, wants to learn Lisp. Racket is an effective gateway drug to the Lisp world :-)

[behnamoh → mark_l_watson]

I've always wondered what LispWorks offers that costs so much. Is it the libraries, better IDE, or something else? Looking at Racket's documentation, it seems pretty "complete" with regard to things it covers (for free).

[pjmlp → behnamoh]

LispWorks and Allegro are the survivors from the Lisp Machine days.

They offer the full development experience as having your own Lisp Machine, with optimizing compilers, IDE, frameworks, debugging tools.

[mark_l_watson → behnamoh]

The cross platform CAPI UI library is good, as are the bundled dev tools. The will give you an evaluation license to try it.