Racket 7.5 releases with relicensing to Apache/MIT, standard JSON MIME, dark mode interface and more

On Tuesday, Racket, a general-purpose programming language announced Racket 7.5. Racket is based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp programming language and is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. Racket is also used to refer to the family of Racket programming languages and the set of tools supporting development on and with Racket.

Key features in Racket 7.5

• This new release will be distributed under a new and less-restrictive license, either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license
• Racket CS will remain in beta for the v7.5, but the compatibility and performance continue to improve. It is expected to be ready for production use by the next release
• In this release of Racket 7.5 the Web Server provides a standard JSON MIME type, including a response/jsexpr form for HTTP responses bearing JSON
• In this release GNU MPFR operations run about 3x faster
• Typed Racket supports definitions of new struct type properties and type checks uses existing struct type properties in struct definitions. Previously, these were ignored by the type checker, so type errors may have been hidden
• The performance bug in v7.4’s big bang has been repaired
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• DrRacket supports Dark Mode for interface elements.
• With this release plot can display parametric 3d surfaces and redex supports modeless judgment forms

Additionally with the above changes, in the Racket 7.5 MacOS Catalina 10.15 includes a new requirement that executables be “notarized”, to give Apple the ability to prevent certain kinds of malware. In this release, all of the disk images (.dmg’s) are notarized, along with the applications that they contain (.app’s).

Many users may not notice any difference, but two groups of Catalina users will be affected; First those who use the “racket” binary directly, and second, those that download the .tgz bundles. In both cases, the operating system is likely to inform that the given executable is not trusted, or that the developer can’t be verified. Fortunately, both groups of users are probably also running commands in a shell, hence the solution for both groups will be the same that is to disable the quarantine flag using the xattr command, for example, xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/racket.

To know more about this news, check out the official announcement on the Racket page.