Welcome to the eleventh issue of Racket News.

This issue finally brings you statistics on more than the racket/racket repository. It brings you some statistics on racket/ChezScheme and racket/typed-racket as well. You might want to see more repositories added, however I don’t want to make the newsletters to long or full of useless data, so I am still trying to understand not only which other repositories to follow but also the best way to present this data given that the current tabular way doesn’t feel like it’s going to scale. I urge you to contact me if you have any suggestions and/or comments.

Grab an espresso and enjoy!

Table of Contents

What’s New?

John Clements just announced that the release process for v7.4 will begin in about a week with the following relevant dates: 7th: Branch day, merge window starts 15th: Merge window ends, testing starts 22nd: Testing ends

Eric Griffis announced that he will be working over the next few months on several interesting projects, namely: a diagramming library, a dynamic, interactive data viz library and a digital audio workstation library. Does that sound interesting? Want to provide feedback, suggestions or support? Check the mailing list.

The Racket Wiki on Github is under-appreciated. Stephen De Gabrielle has been tirelessly improving it - thanks to him it’s becoming a magnificent resource for Racket related information. As an example, take a look at the Creating Languages page.

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.

FileWatchers: Sage Gerard is working on a filesystem monitoring package and requested some feedback, what are you waiting for?

Xsmith: Eric Eide announced Xsmith, a generator of highly effective fuzz testers. Eric Eide is also one of the CSmith developers which makes me straight away excited by this project coming to being… in Racket!

Project in the Spotlight

This week’s project in the spotlight is aws, by Greg Hendershott. This library is amazingly complete supporting S3, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, SES, SNS, SQS, and more.

You can install it with: raco pkg install aws

From the documentation:

This library provides support for many of the Amazon Web Services. (…) The goal is to provide enough “wrapper” around a service’s HTTP interface to make it convenient to use from Racket, but not obscure the service’s semantics.

Featured Racket Paper

This time we have a longish paper by Matthias Felleisen: On the expressive power of programming languages (link to Elsevier).

From the abstract:

The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims on the relative expressive power of programming languages, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences. As a first step in this direction, we develop a formal notion of expressiveness and investigate its properties. To validate the theory, we analyze some widely held beliefs about the expressive power of several extensions of functional languages. Based on these results, we believe that our system correctly captures many of the informal ideas on expressiveness, and that it constitutes a foundation for further research in this direction.

Please note I am not hosting any of these files, but instead I am linking to the PDFs hosted by the researchers themselves. If you think there is a better way to do this or if I should host the files myself, drop me a line.

Upcoming Meetups

Racket School and RacketCon tickets are now for sale in a website near you. Click on the links below!

Racket School 2019 - taught by Racket heavyweights it’s your time to get you #lang-fu up to scratch. Will take place in Salt Lake City, US on July 8–12.

RacketCon 2019 - taking place in Salt Lake City, US on July 13, 14, just after Racket School.

Summer RacketFest 2019 - taking place in Berlin, Germany on August 17, just before ICFP’19.

Help Needed

Do you know a project looking for contributors or help with a task? I would love to hear about it.

Racket Project Statistics

Some data about the activity in the Racket et al. repositories, for the month of June, 2019.

racket typed-racket ChezScheme # master Commits 153 9 23 # Opened PRs 6 1 0 # Merged PRs 18 2 3 # Opened Bugs 15 2 0 # Closed Bugs 9 4 0 # Bugs open 330 209 0 # PRs open 97 19 0

Contributions by (18):

Alexander B. McLin

Alexis King

Andreas Düring

Asumu Takikawa

Atharva Raykar

Ben Greenman

Fred Fu

Gustavo Massaccesi

Matthew Flatt

Noah W M

Paulo Matos

Robby Findler

Ryan Culpepper

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Sorawee Porncharoenwase

Stephen De Gabrielle

Steven Watson

Vincent St-Amour

Of which, making the list the first time this year (6):

Andreas Düring

Asumu Takikawa

Atharva Raykar

Noah W M

Stephen De Gabrielle

Steven Watson

Jobs

If you want to advertise any Racket related jobs, please send me an email or submit an issue.

Contributors

Thanks to

Jesse Alama

for his contributions to this issue.

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.