Franz VS remember

* https://defn.io/2023/02/04/racket-foreign-callouts-to-swift/

I also started out using JSON to exchange data between the languages, but eventually wiring everything manually became an annoyance so I came up with a little Racket DSL[1] that automatically serializes and deserializes between the two languages (at runtime in Racket & using code generation in Swift). So far, I've built two apps with this approach, and I think it's great:

* https://github.com/Bogdanp/Franz (macOS)

Racket is my favorite language. It's fast, practical, has solid foundations and an extremely nice concurrency story (based on concepts borrowed and extended from Concurrent ML). It has an excellent documentation system, with an integrated package ecosystem, which means that most packages have high quality documentation with cross-references. It has a great backwards-compatibility story -- a lot better than Python's, for example, which I use in my current dayjob. So, my impression of the commenters saying it's too academic or not practical is that they probably never dove deeply enough, or they are students who were only exposed to the teaching languages in the past. It's definitely not perfect: the community is small, the runtime has a high memory baseline, parallelism requires spinning up a Racket VM per system thread, among others, but these are things that will improve over time.

In the past several years, I've:

* built & run an e-commerce site written in Racket[1]

* built a native macOS and iOS reminders app, available on the App Store [2, 3, 4]

* built a cross-platform desktop client for Apache Kafka [5, 6, 7]

* built a `#lang` for Lua [8]

Among[9] other[10] things[11]. I think that's all pretty practical stuff!

[1]: https://defn.io/2019/08/20/racket-ecommerce/

[2]: https://defn.io/2020/01/02/ann-remember/

[3]: https://defn.io/2024/04/09/ann-remember-for-ios/

[4]: https://github.com/bogdanp/remember

[5]: https://defn.io/2022/11/20/ann-franz/

[6]: https://defn.io/2023/10/15/ann-franz-for-windows/

[7]: https://defn.io/2023/08/10/ann-franz-source-available/

[8]: https://defn.io/2022/11/12/ann-racket-lua/

[9]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/http-easy/index.html

[10]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/deta/index.html

[11]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html

A really simple keyboard driven reminder tool for macOS:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember

My goal for this year is to continue building (mainly Mac and iOS) apps (like Remember[1] and Franz[2]) using Racket and to help improve the language and ecosystem in any way I can.

[1]: https://remember.defn.io

PS this is a macOS app with the GUI made with swift https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember/tree/master/cocoa/remember/remember but the backend is Racket.