> Most recent example: I participated in Advent of Code this year, and there was almost never a Racket solution posted that wasn't ten times slower (and in my opinion harder to read) than the simple & idiomatic Python solution.
Can you point me to some examples of this? I haven't done AoC and so don't know where to find solutions posted to compare. It should be very rare for idiomatic python or php to be faster than idiomatic racket.
I grant that there is some benefit in that the longer compile times result in an improvement in some benchmarks, but that doesn’t negate that the new back-end is still slower than the old one by every measure.
> Racket is much faster than python or PHP.
This is funny because although you will find benchmarks out there to support this point, in my experience of writing and using Racket programs it has never hold up. Most recent example: I participated in Advent of Code this year, and there was almost never a Racket solution posted that wasn't ten times slower (and in my opinion harder to read) than the simple & idiomatic Python solution.
I love the Racket language, and there are some DSLs like Pollen that do things I simply can’t imagine attempting anywhere else. But it’s for sure my last choice for speed, based on personal experience.