Welcome to the eighteenth issue of Racket News.
If this is your first issue - welcome to Racket News. I have said this before but I should mention it once more. I cannot possibly catch every new single Racket app/post/package, etc on the web every single time. If you have been ignored in the past, it’s just my fault and I would be happy for you to send me an email to let me know of your activity. If you have further suggestions to improve Racket News send them to me as well.
Now on to the real deal, grab a flat white (my favourite while living in the UK) and enjoy!
Table of Contents
- What’s New?
- Racket Around the Web
- New Releases
- Project in the Spotlight
- Featured Racket Paper
- Upcoming Meetups
- Racket Jobs
What’s New?
- Manolis Ragkousis has announced the FOSDEM 2020 Minimalistic, Experimental and Emerging Languages Devroom.
- Sage Gerard, who is bringing Vulkan to Racket, requested for some guinea pigs to test Vulkan on Racket.
- There’s a new Jam in town - Racket 2019 Gamejam organized by Sam Phillips and Stephen De Gabrielle.
- Matthew Flatt has recently written a Building, Distributing and Contributing to Racket guide. Go check it out!
Racket around the web
Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!
- Racket-Vulkan FFI Ready for First Tests by Sage Gerard.
- Progress on racket-vulkan C Type Declarations by Sage Gerard.
New Releases
If you know of library releases or maybe your own libraries and you want them to be featured, please let me know.
vulkan(src/pkg) by Sage Gerard is a package providing Vulkan integration in Racket.package-analysis(src/pkg) by Jack Firth is a package for analyzing the Racket package ecosystem.
Project in the Spotlight
This week’s project in the spotlight is dynamic-ffi by the David Benoit.
From the website:
This module produces automatic ABI-native ffi bindings to C libraries. Dynamic FFI is a native Racket extension which embeds clang/llvm to parse out declarations from C headers and dynamically build ffi objects with correct type/size information. This library is currently only availalable for GNU/Linux, but should be easily portable to other operating systems. If you are experienced with building clang/llvm plugins on other OSes and would like to contribute, please contact the author. This module uses native extensions to Racket’s C runtime, and is not currently compatible with Racket-on-Chez. Support for Racket-on-Chez is planned for the future.
Featured Racket Paper
The featured paper for this issue is Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Contracts Be Misunderstood (Functional Pearl) by Christos Dimoulas, Max S. New, Robert Bruce Findler, and Matthias Felleisen.
Abstract:
Contracts feel misunderstood, especially those with a higher-order soul. While software engineers appreciate contracts as tools for articulating the interface between components, functional programmers desperately search for their types and meaning, completely forgetting about their pragmatics. This gem presents a novel analysis of contract systems. Applied to the higher-order kind, this analysis reveals their large and clearly unappreciated software engineering potential. Three sample applications illustrate where this kind of exploration may lead.
Upcoming Meetups
Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.
Contributors
Thanks to
- Jens Axel Soegaard
for his contributions to this issue.
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.