Re:Future of Racket
by neilv on Wednesday August 07, 2019 @10:57AM
(#20635296)
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. The Racket commmunity has a lot of people using it on the side, like you do, and your interests and contributions matter. I've been in that category myself lately.
If you were drawn to Racket, but want to look around a bit, there are a few other Schemes I find especially interesting, including: Guile, Chicken, Gambit, and Scheme48. Guile is in pre-release of some nice new JIT work, including instant startup from native code caches, and has an active community. If the bulk of your code can be written in RnRS, and you avoid mutating lists, you should be able to move around between the various Schemes and Racket reasonably easily. Of course, there's also CL and Clojure, but those are pretty different.
I didn't know that R had some Scheme ancestry. (For one client, I made an interface to call R from Racket, for a data science system.) I think one of the things Racket was heading towards, around the time of the math modules work, was for Racket to become a newer R. And perhaps have a `#lang r`, as another way of bringing in some of the wealth of R libraries and programmers (and also a similar situation with Fortran). I'm pretty sure we couldn't get Fortran performance with anything other than a native Fortran compiler, and I don't know the state of R performance, but Racket could've had closer to one of the main selling points of Python today (i.e., a wealth of data science libraries are available easily through it).
If you were drawn to Racket, but want to look around a bit, there are a few other Schemes I find especially interesting, including: Guile, Chicken, Gambit, and Scheme48. Guile is in pre-release of some nice new JIT work, including instant startup from native code caches, and has an active community. If the bulk of your code can be written in RnRS, and you avoid mutating lists, you should be able to move around between the various Schemes and Racket reasonably easily. Of course, there's also CL and Clojure, but those are pretty different.
I didn't know that R had some Scheme ancestry. (For one client, I made an interface to call R from Racket, for a data science system.) I think one of the things Racket was heading towards, around the time of the math modules work, was for Racket to become a newer R. And perhaps have a `#lang r`, as another way of bringing in some of the wealth of R libraries and programmers (and also a similar situation with Fortran). I'm pretty sure we couldn't get Fortran performance with anything other than a native Fortran compiler, and I don't know the state of R performance, but Racket could've had closer to one of the main selling points of Python today (i.e., a wealth of data science libraries are available easily through it).