remember VS racket-gui-easy

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.

Looks like you're already in Emacs. I strongly recommend racket-mode as mentioned in another thread.

With regard to prototyping GUI's I'd suggest taking a look at https://github.com/mfelleisen/7GUI. https://github.com/Bogdanp/racket-gui-easy could also be a good place to start.

With regard to Racket more generally, I'm probably not the best person to ask since I had a very high friction start where I just banged my head against the wall until things made sense.

I took a similar approach in my Racket library, gui-easy[1,2]. Though I opted to not defer any computations, any observable (similar to a signal from the post) update propagates to observers immediately, and there's no incrementality -- observables are just boxes whose changes you can subscribe to. Regarding the disposal problem, I used weak references and regarding the where to take observables and where to take concrete values as input question, I decided that any place an observable can go in, a concrete value can as well and it's been a convenient choice so far. For fun, here's an example[3] that builds the todo UI from the post.

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

For native apps, I would devote coding resources to the Guile-GI project which generates Guile bindings to the cross-platform Gtk C library by way of the Gnome Object Introspection and Reflection library. I would also port the Racket gui-easy library over to Guile-GI so declarative GUIs could be written.

There is also gui-easy a declarative gui framework: https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html

It’s not the only version either

See https://github.com/Bogdanp/racket-gui-easy/tree/master/examp...

  },