Racket 7.2, a descendent of Scheme and Lisp, is now out!

On Wednesday, the team behind Racket released Racket 7.2. Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on Scheme and Lisp that emphasizes on functional programming.

Racket’s core is built on a lot of C code, 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. Racket on Chez Scheme (Racket CS) implementation has reached the almost complete status with all functionalities in place. Sharing the status of Racket CS, the blog post reads, “DrRacket CS works fully, the main Racket CS distribution can build itself, and 99.95% of the core Racket test suite passes”. Though the code runs fine, still some work needs to be done to ensure end-to-end performance to make Racket CS the default implementation of Racket.

The following updates apply to both the implementations of Racket:

Contract system: The contract system, which guards one part of a program from another, now supports collapsible contracts. This will prevent repeated wrappers in certain pathological situations.

Quickscript: Quickscript is a tool for DrRacket which allows you to quickly and easily extend DrRacket features. This scripting tool now comes bundled with the standard distribution.

Web server configuration: The built-in configuration used for serving static files is updated to recognize the “.mjs” extension for JavaScript modules.

The data/enumerate library: The library now supports an additional form of subtraction via but-not/e.

The racklog library: A number of improvements are done such as fixing the logic variable binding, logic variables containing predicates being applicable, and the introduction of an %andmap higher-order predicate.