| Racket 7.5 Changes License |
| Written by Ian Elliot |
| Thursday, 28 November 2019 |
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Racket has been updated and is being released under a new, less-restrictive license: either the Apache 2.0 license or the MIT license. The new release also adds a standard JSON MIME type for the Web Server.. 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 change to the licensing terms means most of Racket version 7.5, including the core Racket CS binary, the standard library, and the packages provided with the main distribution, is distributed under a new, less-restrictive license: either the Apache 2.0 license or the MIT license. The developers say some translations (part of the “string-constants-lib” package) have authors that are unknown or have not responded to the Racket team; and some packages did not complete the re-licensing process until after the release process for Racket 7.5 began; those packages will ship with new licenses in Racket 7.6. The reworked distribution of Racket on Chez Scheme (Racket CS) is described as still being "beta quality" in this release. The developers of Racket have been working to create a version of Racket that will run on Chez scheme for a couple of years now. 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. The Racket team says they expect that Racket CS will be ready for production use by the next release. Elsewhere in this release, the Web Server now provides a standard JSON MIME type, including a response/jsexpr form for HTTP responses bearing JSON; and GNU MPFR operations run about three times faster.
More InformationRelated ArticlesThe Scheme Programming Language
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