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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use Racket outside academia? Is it production ready (or friendly)? Especially Typed Racket.

Racket has been used outside academia for years. Racket has been production ready for years.

Here is a recent example https://blog.cloudflare.com/topaz-policy-engine-design/

Yes. I've been using it for 8 years. It has been production ready that whole time. I am not a user of Typed/Racket; the contracts system works well.

https://github.com/evdubs?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language...

I’ve used it for all kinds of production stuff over the years, from web to desktop and mobile apps.

Interesting, how do you distribute/publish those apps?

Web: create an executable distribution[1] and ship it to a server.

Windows/Linux/macOS: same as web, using cross-compilation[5]. Additionally for macOS, embedded in a Swift app and distributed as a .dmg[2] and on the Mac App Store[3]

iOS: embedded in a Swift app and distributed on the App Store[4].

[1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/exe-dist.html

[2]: https://franz.defn.io/

[3]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/franz-apache-kafka-client/id64...

[4]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/podcatcher-podcast-player/id67...

[5]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco-cross/index.html

What UI framework did you use for mobile?

It's SwiftUI. See [1] and [2].

[1]: https://github.com/Bogdanp/NoiseBackendExample

[2]: https://github.com/Bogdanp/Noise

I've used it for some command line [tools][1]. Nothing running on production. Mostly programs that process programs or markup. I haven't used Typed Racket.

[1]: https://github.com/dgoffredo?tab=repositories&q=&type=&langu...

I have one day of college under my belt and use Racket for all my personal projects, as well as in a few areas related to ERP systems professionally. I have found no compelling reason to use Typed Racket so far.

[edit to clarify: I am not in college. I’m in my forties and have 25 years experience as an IT/programming/accounting generalist.]

I tried, it's a really nice language with almost no libraries so you end up reinventing the world every new thing you do. It's not really practical compared to arguably worse languages with better ecosystems

It has a lot of libraries. Can you give some examples of the gaps you are talking about?

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