Racket 7.3 releases with improved Racket-on-Chez, refactored IO system, and more

Earlier this week, the team behind Racket announced the release of Racket 7.3. This release comes with improved Racket-on-Chez, refactored IO system, a new shear function in the Pict library, and more. The Racket programming language is general-purpose, multi-paradigm, and is a dialect of Lisp and Scheme.

Updates in Racket 7.3

Snapshot builds of Racket-on-Chez are now available

Racket’s core was largely implemented in C, which affects its portability to different systems, maintenance, and performance. Hence, back in 2017, the team decided to make the Racket distribution run on Chez Scheme. With the last release (Racket 7.2), the team shared that the implementation of Racket on Chez Scheme (Racket CS) has reached almost complete status with all functionalities in place.

With this release, the team has added more improvements to Racket-on-Chez and has made its snapshot builds available on Racket Snapshots. The team further shared that by next release we can expect Racket-on-Chez to be included as a download option.

Other updates

In addition to the improvements in Racket-on-Chez, the following updates are introduced:

Racket’s IO system is refactored to provide better performance and a simplified internal design.

The JSON reader is now dramatically faster.

The Racket web library now comes with improved support for 307 redirects.

The Plot library comes with color map support for renderers. The Plot library allows you to produce any kind of plot including scatter plots, line plots, contour plots, histograms, and 3D surfaces and isosurfaces.