I enjoyed using it in college during my programming language theory course. However, I thought it was meant to be more of an academic/teaching language. Why should a company use it over Haskell or Clojure?
You can write Haskell in the Racket environment[0].
Racket has a lot of well-designed and well-documented libraries that are a joy to work with. In his Racket manifesto Mathias Felleisen (author of The Little Schemer) describes how Racket is supposed to be useful for programmers at any level.
I'm currently working on a web app using the Datalog[1] back end. I guess that's very similar to Clojure's Datomic or core.logic, and I'm not sure which is "best", but Racket is certainly good.
I'll add wanting to avoid any legal risk from its owner, who is very sue happy. They also got that copywritable, API ruling in one battle. I just stay away from anything Oracle owns. Using open standards future-proofs against this a lot.
I think racket would be a good choice for internal company tools. It’s batteries included philosophy allows you to create very complex apps with minimal effort.
Racket is significantly more expressive than clojure in many different ways (nice gui tools, very sophisticated macro system, good IDE)
I wouldn’t want to use racket for applications that would have thousands or millions of concurrent users. For programming in the large, clojure wins by a long shot.
> I wouldn’t want to use racket for applications that would have thousands or millions of concurrent users. For programming in the large, clojure wins by a long shot.
Can you explain why?
Because it's been used more in big prod envs? Or for reason intrinsic to the languages themselves? If the latter, which ones?
Indeed, and Arc has some brilliant ideas, but if you ever tried to hack in it, you'd experience how dog slow it really is. But Arc's web framework is implemented in somewhat low level MzScheme and is entirely different (and much slower) than web apps in Racket's[0].
Part of what makes Hacker News fast is that the page only has 4-ish images (if you count the invisible gif that is used for indentation) and a tiny amount of JS.
Yeah, but that's sort of the point: for most web applications, most performance issues are not the result of the implementation language but of the chosen architecture. If a fairly inefficient language like Arc can handle HN loads (for the most part, at least), almost anything can.
> for most web applications, most performance issues are not the result of the implementation language but of the chosen architecture.
I don't think that's true (but I also don't understand what is meant by architecture in this context).
There's a simple file upload form example in the Arc community repository. It's so slow that it would timeout on files smaller than 100K. I tried optimizing the POST request parsing, but could still only barely get Arc to handle file sizes of 5M.
Tried making a similar simple file upload form in Racket, and it runs way faster. But it shouldn't be surprising that some languages are less efficient than others, right?
I'm also not sure that most web applications are text-only. Many web applications send and receive other things that plaintext.
I think Racket is by far the better language. But the tools you have on the JVM are unparalleled. Racket's GC is not the greatest and the number of options you have to tune it are very limited. The JVM is very flexible and allows you to tune your application through a multitude of parameters.
What about the battle-tested Linux kernel? If you compile your racket apps to a native binary, you can run it directly on the Linux kernel, and benefit from 25 years of use in production! People deploy Golang and Rustlang apps everyday in prod using that approach it seems to work well for them. Note, both languages are younger than Racket.
Compiled Racket programs are nowhere near the speed of Rust or Go. Racket's GC is objectively much much worse than the JVM.
Of course you can serve millions of users with Racket, like HN. But the JVM today is much better choice. The JVM's GC is world-class and the number of man-hours put in it is probably many orders of magnitudes more than that of Racket's.
Racket has a lot of well-designed and well-documented libraries that are a joy to work with. In his Racket manifesto Mathias Felleisen (author of The Little Schemer) describes how Racket is supposed to be useful for programmers at any level.
I'm currently working on a web app using the Datalog[1] back end. I guess that's very similar to Clojure's Datomic or core.logic, and I'm not sure which is "best", but Racket is certainly good.
[0]: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2017/05/27/realizing-hack...
[1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/datalog/interop.html