Racket 7.3 has been released with improvements to Racket-on-Chez and a much faster JSON reader.

Racket is described as a “full-spectrum programming language” that goes beyond Lisp and Scheme with dialects that support objects, types and laziness. When coding in it, you can link components written in different dialects, and write your own project-specific dialect if you want. The Racket libraries support applications from web servers and databases to GUIs and charts.

The developers say that  Racket-on-Chez continues to improve. Snapshot builds are currently available at pre.racket-lang.org, and the developers expect that Racket-on-Chez will be included as a download option in the next release.

The aim is that the main Racket distribution will run on Chez Scheme
instead of the current Racket VM. Work has been ongoing in developing Racket-on-Chez for a couple of years. At the moment, the core Racket implementation relies on a lot of C code, which is problematic both for maintenance, for porting it to new platforms such as JavaScript, and for improving performance.

Chez Scheme is both a programming language and an implementation of that language, with supporting tools and documentation. It is a superset of the language described in the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R6RS). Chez Scheme supports all standard features of Scheme, including first-class procedures, proper treatment of tail calls, continuations, user-defined records, libraries, exceptions, and hygienic macro expansion.

In addition to the work on Racket-on-Chez, this release has a refactored IO system that aims to improve performance and simplify internal design. The JSON reader is described as being "dramatically faster", and the web server provides better response messages by default for common status codes.

Elsewhere, the plot library includes color map support for renderers, and the Racket web library has improved support for 307 redirects.

More Information

Racket

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