Racket News - Issue 16

Permalink: https://racket-news.com/2019/09/racket-news-issue-16.html

Welcome to the 0x10th issue of Racket News.

In the past couple of weeks, we saw the end of the Summer Standard Fish competition which showcased some amazing art and libraries in Racket - I will get into that later on.

This issue I am trying to host the featured papers PDF files in an attempt to organize them into some sort of searchable list. Currently this is in a folder inside my Google Drive which I made public. If you have any suggestions or comments, don’t forget to drop me a line.

Grab a latte and enjoy!

Table of Contents

  1. Summer Picture competition
  2. What’s New?
  3. Racket Around the Web
  4. New Releases
  5. Project in the Spotlight
  6. Featured Racket Paper
  7. Upcoming Meetups

Summer Standard Fish Competition

Stephen De Gabrielle, who ran the competition, posted the results on September 3rd and later posted the community choice winners. The entries can be found on the Standard Fish Github page.

The winners are - drum-roll please:

The community choice winners are - drum-roll:

  1. tessellation by Zachary Romero
  2. lightsaber by Justin Zamora

And a special mention goes to the best entry with butter and local maine maple syrup waffle-racket by Connie.

Thank you to Stephen for running this competition and all the amazing entries.

What’s New?

  • Jens Axel-Soegaard just released an amazing tutorial on “How to Write Web Applications in Racket”.
  • Due to the work of Bogdan Popa, Jack Firth’s racket-docker now supports Racket CS docker images.
  • Only just noticed the existence of Dali, a simple text templating library in the style of mustache/handlebars. From the repository it seems to be either stable or unmaintained.

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

New Releases

If you know of library releases or maybe your own libraries and you want them to be featured, please let me know.

  • rockstar is a Racket implementation of the Rockstar programming language by whichxjy as #lang rockstar.
  • phone-number is a library by Yanying Wang to obtain phone number locations and other information.
  • smtpable is a library by Yanying Wang to send emails via smtp.
  • timeless is a library by Yanying Wang to work with times.

Project in the Spotlight

The project in the spotlight for this issue is Racket Mode for Emacs by Greg Hendershott.

From the webpage:

This provides a major mode to edit Racket source files, as well as a major mode for a Racket REPL. The edit/run experience is similar to DrRacket.

Racket mode powers the workflow of many of the Racket users that prefer to keep their lives inside Emacs. Check out the docs once you install it - they are very thorough.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is Foreign Interface for PLT Scheme by Eli Barzilay and Dmitry Orlovsky. This paper sets the foundations for what is today the amazing FFI library we all use and love.

From the abstract:

Even a programmer devoted to Scheme may prefer using foreign libraries in certain situation. Connecting the two worlds involves glue code, usually using C, which requires significant programming efforts and system expertise. In this paper we describe a PLT Scheme extension for interacting with foreign code, designed around a simple philosophy: stay in the fun world, even if it is no longer a safe sand box. Our system relieves the programmer from low-level technicalities while keeping the benefits of Scheme as a better programming environment compared to C.

Upcoming Meetups

Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.

Disclaimer

This issue is brought to you by Paulo Matos. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are solely mine and they do not represent the views of the PLT Team, who develop Racket.

I have also tried to survey the most relevant things that happened in Racket lang recently. If you have done something awesome, wrote a blog post or seen something that I missed - my apologies. Let me know so I can rectify it in the next issue.


Contribute

Have you seen something cool related Racket? Send it in and we will feature it in the next issue.