[mark_l_watson]

I would like to see wider adoption of Racket. I spent six weeks earlier this year evaluating and comparing Racket, LispWorks Common Lisp, and Swift for an application [1] I am working on. I ended up not choosing Racket, but it was a very close decision.

As a modern Lisp, Racket really has it all: vibrant user and dev community, portable GUI support, easy to make standalone applications, and great libraries.

[1] http://knowledgegraphnavigator.com/

[tjr]

Can you share, what was the deciding factor against Racket?

[147]

Not OP but for me, I wanted to write http server applications and I was put off by having to specify the http response status messages and timestamps. I'm wondering why something slightly higher level isn't built into the standard lib.

[Bogdanp]

You don’t have to specify those things yourself unless you want to manually construct a response struct. There are helpers like response/xexpr and response/output that construct responses for you.

This article might help: https://defn.io/2020/02/12/racket-web-server-guide/

[147]

But if I wanted to say return a 404 I don't want to have to specify "Not Found" along with it every time.

[Bogdanp]

As of a couple releases ago, the message gets set according to the status code so this code would behave as expected:

    (response/xexpr #:code 404 '(h1 "Not Found"))

[samth]

These days, response status messages are automatically inferred: https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/http.html?q=response...

[147]

Thanks! I’m gonna give racket another spin now.