Welcome to the fifty-sixth issue of Racket News.
Hello everyone - welcome to issue 56 and 2022. This issue has been in the making for way too long and I have decided to publish what I have slowly been putting together. A quick recap of the last few months is unnecessary but one personal issue after another meant I lacked the ability to focus on anything besides the most essential work I needed to do. My apologies for the long silence and thanks to everyone who contacted me showing support. My hope is that this issue will highlight most of the things that happened in the last few months. I will not attempt to publish another issue again in two weeks though. I need to regroup and reorganize, and prepare the year 2021 review to come out next issue. Therefore, I am planning to publish another issue in 4 weeks. If you have any questions or suggestions let me know.
Grab a good cup of coffee. Enjoy!
Table of Contents
- What’s New?
- Racket Around the Web
- Project in the Spotlight
- Featured Racket Paper
- Upcoming Meetups
- Racket Project Statistics - November
- Racket Project Statistics - December
- Racket Project Statistics - January
- Sponsors
What’s New?
- The RacketCon videos for 2021 are online.
- Since RacketCon announced the move to Discourse, discussions there took off. Don’t miss interacting with the community and check the Racket Discourse.
- A video stream about Racket from Taggart Tech.
- Stephen De Gabrielle and Jens Axel Soegaard organized a Creative Racket Competition. It finishes today - if you didn’t manage to participate, at least enjoy the entries.
- Jens Axel Soegaard explains what is Urlang in this Discourse post.
- Siddhartha Kasivajhula has published a Qi Tutorial, this issue’s featured project.
Racket around the web
Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!
- Parallelizing the Racket Web Server by Bogdan Popa.
- LISP GUI Examples by Bogdan Popa.
- Racket Structures by Robert Postill.
- Mocking File Output With Racket by Robert Postill.
- Crafting Interpreters in Typed Racket by Micah Cantor.
- Why learn Racket? A student’s perspective by Micah Cantor.
- The good and the bad of Typed Racket by Micah Cantor.
- Generate SQLite ORM code from DB metadata using Lisp macros by Shane Creighton-Young.
Project in the Spotlight
This week’s project in the spotlight is Qi by Siddhartha Kasivajhula.
From the website:
Qi is an embeddable, general-purpose language to allow convenient framing of programming logic in terms of functional flows.
Check out the Tutorial.
Featured Racket Paper
This issue’s featured paper is A Small Scheme VM, Compiler, and REPL in 4K by Samuel Yvon and Marc Feeley.
Abstract:
Compact language implementations are increasingly popular for use in resource constrained environments. For embedded applications such as robotics and home automation, it is useful to support a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) so that a basic level of interactive development is possible directly on the device. Due to its minimalistic design, the Scheme language is particularly well suited for such applications and several implementations are available with different tradeoffs. In this paper we explain the design and implementation of Ribbit, a compact Scheme system that supports a REPL, is extensible and has a 4 KB executable code footprint.
Upcoming Meetups
Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.
Racket Project Statistics - November, 2021
Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of November, 2021.
| # commits | Issues (new/closed/open) | PRs (new/closed/open) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| racket | 102 | 23/8/346 | 11/12/90 |
| drracket | 10 | 10/6/217 | 3/2/4 |
| scribble | 8 | 1/0/75 | 0/0/18 |
| typed-racket | 4 | 8/2/259 | 4/5/26 |
| plot | 2 | 1/0/10 | 2/2/0 |
| redex | 0 | 0/0/40 | 0/0/7 |
Contributions by (12):
- Alex Harsányi
- Ayman Osman
- Ben Greenman
- Bogdan Popa
- Fred Fu
- Joel Dueck
- Matthew Flatt
- Noah Ma
- Robby Findler
- Stefan Schwarzer
- Stephen De Gabrielle
- Viko Riféo
Of these, 2 are new contributors for 2021:
- Ayman Osman
- Viko Riféo
Repositories included above are: racket, redex, typed-racket, drracket, scribble, plot.
Racket Project Statistics - December, 2021
Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of December, 2021.
| # commits | Issues (new/closed/open) | PRs (new/closed/open) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| racket | 59 | 18/10/354 | 23/19/94 |
| drracket | 6 | 6/3/220 | 0/0/4 |
| scribble | 1 | 2/0/77 | 0/0/18 |
| plot | 0 | 0/0/10 | 0/0/0 |
| typed-racket | 1 | 10/4/259 | 2/1/27 |
| redex | 1 | 0/0/40 | 0/0/7 |
Contributions by (14):
- AlexKnauth
- Andy Keep
- Bob Burger
- Bogdan Popa
- Cameron Moy
- D. Ben Knoble
- Fred Fu
- Gustavo Massaccesi
- Joel Dueck
- Marc Burns
- Matthew Flatt
- Robby Findler
- Zachary Mao
sorawee
Of these, 3 are new contributors for 2021:
- Andy Keep
- D. Ben Knoble
- Zachary Mao
Repositories included above are: racket, redex, typed-racket, drracket, scribble, plot.
Racket Project Statistics - January, 2022
Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of January, 2022.
| # commits | Issues (new/closed/open) | PRs (new/closed/open) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| racket | 65 | 18/16/356 | 17/13/98 |
| scribble | 8 | 0/1/76 | 0/0/18 |
| typed-racket | 6 | 4/1/268 | 6/6/27 |
| plot | 6 | 0/0/10 | 3/3/0 |
| drracket | 5 | 3/1/222 | 2/0/6 |
| redex | 3 | 0/0/40 | 0/0/7 |
Contributions by (17):
- Alex Harsányi
- Alexis King
- Cameron Moy
- Chung-chieh Shan
- Fred Fu
- Gustavo Massaccesi
- J. Ryan Stinnett
- John Clements
- Maciej Barć
- Matthew Flatt
- Matthias Felleisen
- Philip McGrath
- Robby Findler
- Sergiu Ivanov
- Stefan Schwarzer
- Stephen De Gabrielle
sorawee
Repositories included above are: racket, redex, typed-racket, drracket, scribble, plot.
Sponsors
Many thanks to my sponsors:
- Bogdan Popa is a software developer based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He is the author of various Racket libraries and he runs an e-commerce business built on top of Racket.
- Geoffrey Knauth is a programmer, pilot, coxswain/rower, linguist.
- Jesse Alama. Jesse is a Racketeer, mathematician, and writer based in Main, Germany. He is the organizer of RacketFest, and writer of various Racket books and libraries.
- John Clements. John is a researcher and professor at Cal Poly, a member of the core Racket, and Racket release manager.
- J. Ryan Stinnett.
- Marc Kaufmann is an assistant professor in economics who runs online surveys and experiments. To make this easier, he is developing congame with the help of Bogdan Popa: Bogdan writes code, Marc contributes ideas and bugs to congame - but mostly bugs.
- Robert Postill is a Melbourne-based technologist with a love of LISP and Racket.
- Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. Sam is a researcher and associate professor at Indiana University, a member of the core Racket team, and the brains behind Typed Racket and Pycket.
- Stephen De Gabrielle. Stephen is a product manager at Epro. He is a long time Racket community contributor, editing the Racket wiki, running many community competitions and events, among many other things.
- and my private sponsors, who shall remain anonymous.
If you wish to sponsor me and my work on Racket and Racket News - feel free to visit my GitHub Sponsors webpage. All sponsorship levels are welcome.
Contributors
Thanks to
- Stephen De Gabrielle
for their contributions to this issue.
The next issue is planned for publication during week 14. Contributions welcome!
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.