Comment by mdaniel

5 months ago

sbcl is a workhorse. I wonder if the Racket folks didn't consider the Arc under production workloads general purpose enough to fix. I actually don't know of any other projects that use Racket in anger

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Armed Bear because that JVM library ecosystem is enormous https://github.com/armedbear/abcl

The Racket folks have always been most helpful and never turned down a request to fix anything.

  • Apologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users

    • The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at.

      (Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)

    • My assumption is that creating a compiler and runtime to match sbcl isn't in scope for racket, so it wouldn't be polite to request racket to do so :) there were probably other benefits of similar orthogonal features, where racket users don't necessarily need it, but another language/runtime already has it because that's where people who need that go

      9 replies →