Racket

PLT is happy to announce the release of Racket, available from

  http://racket-lang.org/

With Racket, you can script command shells and web servers; you can quickly prototype animations and complex GUIs; regexps and threads are here to serve you. To organize your systems, you can mix and match classes, modules or components. Best of all, you start without writing down types. If you later wish to turn your script into a program, equip your Racket modules with explicit type declarations as you wish. And Racket doesn't just come as a typed variant; you can also write your modules in a purely functional and lazy dialect.

Racket comes in so many flavors because Racket is much more than a standard scripting language or a plain programming language. Racket supports language extensibility to an unequaled degree. A Racket programmer knows that making up a new language is as easy as writing a new library.

To help you start quickly, Racket includes batteries in all shapes and sizes, most importantly, extensive documentation and all kinds of libraries.

Racket occupies a unique position between research and practice. It inherits many major ideas from language research, among them type safety (when the type system says that x is a number, then at runtime it always is a number) and memory safety (when some memory is reclaimed by the garbage collector it is impossible to still have a reference to it). At the same time, user demand governs rigid adherence to purely theoretical principles.

Racket, formerly PLT Scheme, is a product of over 15 years of development. Although Racket starts with a mature software base and an established user community, its new name reflects our view that this is just the beginning of Racket's evolution.