Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of Racket News.

With RacketCS now officially production-ready have you been running it on a daily basis? Have you found any issues? Make sure you report them, if you find any. The community is thriving and lots of things have been going on so this issue is jam-packed.

Have I missed any of your Racket-related blog posts here? If so, let me know.

Grab yourself a double espresso and lets go. Enjoy!

Table of Contents

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

What’s New?

• Last week RacketFest, organized by Jesse Alama, took place in Berlin, Germany. Unfortunately, I was unable to join but from the several comments on twitter it seems to have been yet another success. Thanks to Jesse for RacketFest!
• Sage Gerard is starting a syntax highlighter project. If this is something that interests you, join the discussion!
• Would you be interested in a Racket Meetup in London? If so, chime in!
• Stephen de Gabrielle ran a quick racket editor survey, whose results are now online. The same survey took place in slack as well.
• Matthew Butterick started an interesting thread on coding differences between RacketBC (the current Racket - BC stands for Before Chez) and RacketCS. It is definitely worth a read!

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

• The Big Switcheroo by Greg Hendershott.
• Creating Living, Reactive Builds in Racket by Sage Gerard.
• The Stoopedist Markup Language in the World by Sage Gerard.
• How to Create a Pollen Markup Alternative in 61 Lines 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.

• koyo-north(src/pkg) is a north database migrator component for koyo by Bogdan Popa.
• libargon2(src/pkg) is a package to distribute libargon2 binaries as a Racket package for Linux and MacOS by Bodgan Popa.
• rapider(src/pkg) is web scraping micro-framework by nuty.
• vela(src/pkg) is a web framework for Racket by nuty.
• 2048(src/pkg) is an implementation of the game 2048 by Philip McGrath.

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is Cover (src/pkg) by Spencer Florence.

From the website:

This library is an extensible code coverage tool for racket. It comes with the ability to generate HTML reports, and has extensions to submit coverage reports to Codecov and Coveralls. You can also create your own coverage formats.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is Submodules in Racket: You Want it When, Again? by Matthew Flatt.

Abstract:

In an extensible programming language, programmers write code that must run at different times—in particular, at compile time versus run time. The module system of the Racket programming language enables a programmer to reason about programs in the face of such extensibility, because the distinction between run-time and compile-time phases is built into the language model. Submodules extend Racket’s module system to make the phase-separation facet of the language extensible. That is, submodules give programmers the capability to define new phases, such as “test time” or “documentation time,” with the same reasoning and code-management benefits as the built-in distinction between run time and compile time.

Upcoming Meetups

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

• RacketCon 2020, shall be soon announced for the Fall of 2020 celebrating a quarter century of Racket.

Racket Project Statistics

Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of February, 2020.

Contributions by (17):

• Alexander Shopov
• Ben Greenman
• Gustavo Massaccesi
• James Bornholt
• Jamie Taylor
• John Clements
• Jon Zeppieri
• Leo Shen
• Matthew Flatt
• Paulo Matos
• Robby Findler
• Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
• Spencer Florence
• Stephen Chang
• Xu Chunyang
• R. Kent Dybvig
• kryptine

Of these, 10 are new contributors for 2020:

• Alexander Shopov
• Ben Greenman
• James Bornholt
• Jamie Taylor
• Jon Zeppieri
• Leo Shen
• Spencer Florence
• Stephen Chang
• Xu Chunyang
• kryptine

Repositories included above are: racket, ChezScheme, redex, typed-racket, drracket, scribble, plot.

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.