Welcome to the twenty-ninth issue of Racket News.

This issue should have come out April 6 (Monday last week). However, due to the current global situation and my own personal inner crisis, I had not feeling 100% and so decided to take last week off from online presence and although I initially thought I would be able to publish Racket News, that didn’t happen. The schedule is not slightly skewed since issue 30 should be out next Monday, April 20 but it doesn’t make much sense since things have been quiet in Racket world.

Therefore, we will resume normal schedule with issue 30 in the beginning of May. So issue 30 comes out May 4, issue 31 comes out May 18, and so on.

Until the next issue, stay safe, stay healthy and stay indoors.

Grab yourself a strong espresso, and 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
8. Jobs

What’s New?

• Up until recently it was only possible to embed Racket BC in a program, but not Racket CS. According to Matthew in a recent email that has changed and there is some snapshot documentation already available.
• John Clements announced the release process for Racket v7.7 has begun.
  • April 7: Branch day, merge window starts
  • April 25: Merge window ends, testing starts
  • April 22: Testing ends

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

• Synthesizing optimal 8051 code by whitequark.
• Minimizing logic expressions by whitequark.
• A Game of Tetris (user interface) by Alex Harsányi.
• Template Macros, Initial Release by Eric Griffis.

New Releases

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

• template(src/pkg) is a racket meta-program generator combining the flexibility of template meta-programming with the safety of Racket’s hygienic macro subsystem by Eric Griffis.
• racket-pure-crypto(src/pkg) is pure racket DES/TDES/AES crypto implementation by Chen Xiao.
• font-finder(src/pkg) is a library for locating all font files on your computer by David Storrs.
• ulid(src/pkg) is an implementation of ULIDs for Racket by Bogdan Popa.
• buid(src/pkg) is an implementation of universally unique, lexicographically-sortable flake ids for Racket by Bogdan Popa.
• words(src/pkg) is a library to generate lists of words by Matthew Butterick.
• object-backtrace(src/pkg) is a library for Racket CS to find out what keeps an object alive by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt.

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is Deta (src/pkg) by Bodgan Popa.

From the website:

This library automatically maps database tables to Racket structs and lets you perform CRUD operations on them as well as arbitrary queries. Sort of like an ORM, but without associations and all the bad bits.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is Towards Practical Gradual Typing by Asumu Takikawa, Daniel Felty, Earl Dean, Matthew Flatt, Robert Bruce Findler, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen.

Abstract:

Over the past 20 years, programmers have embraced dynamically-typed programming languages.By now, they have also come to realize that programs in these languages lack reliable type in-formation for software engineering purposes. Gradual typing addresses this problem; it empowersprogrammers to annotate an existing system with sound type information on a piecemeal basis.This paper presents an implementation of a gradual type system for a full-featured class-basedlanguage as well as a novel performance evaluation framework for gradual typing.

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 March, 2020.

Contributions by (15):

• Alexander Shopov
• Ben Greenman
• Benjamin Yeung
• Brian Adkins
• Greg Hendershott
• Gustavo Massaccesi
• Kartik Singhal
• Matthew Flatt
• Paulo Matos
• Robby Findler
• Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
• Sorawee Porncharoenwase
• Tom Gillespie
• lkh01
• Štěpán Němec

Of these, 7 are new contributors for 2020:

• Benjamin Yeung
• Brian Adkins
• Kartik Singhal
• Sorawee Porncharoenwase
• Tom Gillespie
• lkh01
• Štěpán Němec

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

Jobs

If you want to advertise any Racket related jobs, please send me an email.

• Software Development Engineer Intern - Amazon Redshift Database: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking for a short-term (4–6 month) position for some experimental development, likely embedding Racket or other Lisp/Schemes in a high-performance setting. See the link or contact Hinnerk Gildhoff (hinnerk@amazon.de), the hiring manager for this position.

Contributors

Thanks to

• Jesse Alama

for their 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.