Racket v9.2

https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/05/racket-v9-2.html

by spdegabrielle • 2 months ago

240 35 2 months ago

Racket - the Language-Oriented Programming Language - version 9.2 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org

See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/05/racket-v9-2.html for the release announcement and highlights.

If you are using rackup you can upgrade with `rackup upgrade`

Don’t forget to migrate your packages with raco pkg migrate 9.1

xiaoyu2006• 2 months ago

Racket is my favorite language, unfortunately I still use python the most mainly because of the ecosystem. https://xkcd.com/353/

gus_massa• 2 months ago

There is a package made by soegaard to use Python libraries from Racket https://racket.discourse.group/t/pyffi-use-python-from-racke...

noosphr7• 2 months ago

Racket is an amazing language for prototyping ideas that you don't understand yet.

At $dayjob I'm using it to test what novel geometries of deep learning models would look like. Being able to redefine any part of the stack for any reason is a superpower you don't know you need until you do.

A great place to start is the little learner which holds your hand until you get opinionated about what the underlying primitives should look like. E.g. what if we used sparse tensor representation?

UncleOxidant2• 2 months ago

That sounds kind of amazing. But you're not actually doing the machine learning in Racket, are you? Is your Racket code generating other code like PyTorch?

noosphr7• 2 months ago

I'm doing the learning in racket because the bottleneck is human understanding.

That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

srean• 2 months ago

You might like having a go at Lush. It has fallen out of favor of late but is a very interesting language/system.

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/lush-my-favori...

noosphr7• 2 months ago

Sounds interesting but I'm using very spare very high rank tensors, e.g. rank 3 neuron equivalents.

As such pretty much all numerical optimisations are useless for my work. Racket however chugs along happily, if slowly.

montyanne• 2 months ago

Northeastern graduates assemble!

greyb• 2 months ago

Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs

adamddev12• 2 months ago

I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.

submeta• 2 months ago

I used a predecessor of this almost thirty years ago to learn Scheme and work trough the book SICP. The Racket maintainers still ship updates and new features, that’s remarkable.

Scheme is a wonderful lisp dialect. It taught me basics of functional programming, about closures, about tail call recursion, about functions always returning values (which annoyed me a lot when I started learning Python, where .append or .sort returened `none` instead of the list, and were destructive).

So I have very fond memories of Racket (then DrScheme) and Scheme. Had also written my matrix multiplication library and my CAS system to mimic the functionality of my HP28s calculator.

Have to look into it again.

meken• 2 months ago

I’m thankful for Racket - it got me regularly programming in lisp by virtue of LeetCode accepting it as one of its languages.

I did start to feel Racket’s “wordiness” towards the end - it started to feel a bit like COBOL. I’ve since moved onto Clojure and really appreciate the shorter keywords/function names/fewer parenthesis.

I still miss for/fold though - that thing is an absolute machine.

ashton3142• 2 months ago

Racket gets in your head like nothing else. Once you learn it, (Scheme does this too) you get x-ray vision to see every other language modulo syntax.

I have been writing Elixir professionally for the bulk of my career. (It’s been pretty awesome!) Despite this, I consider Racket to be my native language because it’s so easy for me to think in Racket. It’s the perfect bridge between my brain and the problem domain.

NuclearPM• 2 months ago

Modulo is the wrong word.

ashton3142• 1 month ago

No, it’s actually the right word. I’m saying you see past syntax and get to the underlying semantics of PLs after learning Racket. (And modulo is a perfectly acceptable word to express this.)

fayten• 2 months ago

I have spent a lot of time in the PL space and I just cannot wrap my head around the love of Racket. I absolutely love the innovation that comes out of the community though! The gradual types system work, nanopass, embeddable DSLs are all fabulous so I like to keep tabs on what they are cooking up.

I recently picked up Essentials of Compilation by Jeremy Siek, perhaps his book and lectures will make something click for me.

In the meantime Julia has been my happy medium for a “lisp”.

pjmlp• 2 months ago

You might also want to have a look into Dylan.

It was the first mainstream attempt to an ALGOL style Lisp.

https://opendylan.org/documentation/index.html

Pity it didn't went down well at Apple.

dismalaf• 2 months ago

Racket is cool, has nice features, simpler than Common Lisp and comes with an editor which is nice. I'm always somewhat jealous and want to use it.

But it's really hard to give up the raw power of Common Lisp and ability to write low-level code. Even if the language and tooling is all more complicated.

mark_l_watson• 2 months ago

I tend to move back and forth between Common Lisp and Racket - so many good things from both communities and tech.

Racket v9.2

Related Stories