Welcome to the twenty fourth issue of Racket News.

Things have been quiet during the beginning of 2020 in Racket world, so this will be a short one. In any case, a quick (and last) reminder to all Racket News contributors in 2019 to give me a shout (see last issue).

Grab a coffee and enjoy!

Table of Contents

What’s New?

Florian Volk (@digitalvolk) has recently published a Youtube playlist with an online tutorial for Racket (In German).

Otherwise there is an eerie silence this time of the year…

Racket around the web

Do you blog about Racket? Let me know!

New Releases

If you know of library releases or maybe your own libraries and you want them to be featured, please let me know.

interconfection (src/pkg) by Ross Angle.

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is Terminal Phase by Christopher Lemmer Webber. It is a space shooter game that runs in your terminal.

This game just made 1.0 and although pretty recent it’s one of the most fun games I have seen in Racket. Also a test program for Spritely Goblins, an actor model library written in Racket and another project deserving a mention here.

Featured Racket Paper

This issue’s featured paper is How to Evaluate the Performance of Gradual Type Systems by Ben Greenman, Max S. New, Daniel Feltey, Robert Bruce Findler, Jan Vitek, and Matthias Felleisen.

Abstract:

A sound gradual type system ensures that untyped components of a program can never break the guarantees of statically typed components. This assurance relies on runtime checks, which in turn impose performance overhead in proportion to the frequency and nature of interaction between typed and untyped components. The literature on gradual typing lacks rigorous descriptions of methods for measuring the performance of gradual type systems. This gap has consequences for the implementors of gradual type systems and developers who use such systems. Without systematic evaluation of mixed-typed programs, implementors cannot precisely determine how improvements to a gradual type system affect performance. Developers cannot predict whether adding types to part of a program will significantly degrade (or improve) its performance. This paper presents the first method for evaluating the performance of sound gradual type systems. The method quantifies both the absolute performance of a gradual type system and the relative performance of two implementations of the same gradual type system. To validate the method, the paper reports on its application to 20 programs and 3 implementations of Typed Racket.

Upcoming Meetups

Do you know of any upcoming meetups I can advertise? Let me know.

RacketFest 2020: organised by Jesse Alama and taking place in Berlin, Germany on February 27, 2020.

RacketCon 2020, shall be soon announced for the Fall of 2020 celebrating a quarter century of Racket.

Disclaimer

This issue is brought to you by Paulo Matos. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are solely mine and they do not represent the views of the PLT Team, who develop Racket.

I have also tried to survey the most relevant things that happened in Racket lang recently. If you have done something awesome, wrote a blog post or seen something that I missed - my apologies. Let me know so I can rectify it in the next issue.