Racket executables made by raco exe are known to be quite large. One of tools that can be used to help reduce the size of produced binaries is the gzexe program.

gzeze is a tool that can compress a executable binary. It can be acquired by installing gzip on most Linux distributions (included in the app-arch/gzip package on Gentoo).

Creating a hello-world executable with Racket

Write following contents to hello-world.rkt file:

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#lang racket/base

(define (main)
  (displayln "It REPLs. Ship it!"))

(module+ main
  (main))

To make a binary run:

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raco exe --orig-exe -v -o hello-world hello-world.rkt

The file hello-world will be produced.

This is what file hello-world says about it:

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hello-world: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV),
dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2,
for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped

This “small” executable weights 46 MB!

In comparison busybox weights around 2 MB.

Compressing with gzexe

Keep in mind that gzeze will overwrite the compressed file and create a backup with appended "~".

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gzexe hello-world

And this gives us only 8,5 MB. Nice!

In comparison bazel, which is a single-binary build system written in JAVA, executable takes 33 MB on my Gentoo machine. I tried compressing it with gzexe and it reduces it only by 10%, to around 29 MB.

gzexeis not a silver bullet but with Racket exes it works very nicely.

Constructing debugging syntax

I wanted to echo parameter values when I set them in my blog’s frog.rkt config file.

Nothing simpler in Racket!

First I create this macro for echoing a single parameter value when it is set:

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(define-syntax-rule (verbose-set-parameter parameter-id parameter-value)
  (begin
    ;; Set the parameter.
    (parameter-id parameter-value)

    ;; Then call the parameter and print is's value.
    ;; The "'parameter-id" is special syntax
    ;; for turning a "parameter-id" identifier to a symbol.
    ;; We can also write it like:
    ;; > (quote parameter-id)
    ;; to be less confusing.
    (printf "[DEBUG] (~a ~v)\n" 'parameter-id (parameter-id))))

then, I create a wrapper for above macro that can take multiple parameter pairs:

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(define-syntax-rule (verbose-set-parameters (parameter-id parameter-value) ...)
  (begin
    ;; Unpack a chain of "(parameter-id parameter-value)" pairs
    ;; using the "..." syntax.
    (verbose-set-parameter parameter-id parameter-value) ...))

Using the macro

Afterwards we can call it like so:

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(verbose-set-parameters
 (current-title "XGQT's blog")
 (current-author "Maciej Barć"))

Notice that even the form of setting a parameter, that is (parameter-procedure "value"), remains the same, but in reality it is just similar to how the syntax macro pattern-matches on it.

Inspecting macro expansion

In racket-mode inside GNU Emacs we can inspect the macro expansion with racket-expand-region. Stepping through the expansion provided this result:

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(begin
  (begin
    (current-title "XGQT's blog")
    (printf "[DEBUG] (~a ~v)\n" 'current-title (current-title)))
  (begin
    (current-author "Maciej Barć")
    (printf "[DEBUG] (~a ~v)\n" 'current-author (current-author))))

Equality methods

By implementing a method for equality equal-to? and two extraction methods equal-hash-code-of and equal-secondary-hash-code-of we can define our own object comparison rules.

For more info see Object Equality and Hashing.

Consider the following example:

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(define integer%
  (class* object% (equal<%>)
    (super-new)

    (init-field [value 0])

    (define/public (equal-to? other-object recur)
      (= value (get-field value other-object)))

    (define/public (equal-hash-code-of hash-code)
      (hash-code value))

    (define/public (equal-secondary-hash-code-of hash-code)
      (hash-code value))))

If we create a new integer% object we can notice that it is not transparent (we can not inspect values of any of it’s fields).

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(new integer%)
;;  => (object:integer% ...)

But if we compare two fresh integer% objects they will be equal.

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(equal? (new integer%) (new integer%))
;;  => #true

Transparent class

A transparent cvlass is a class with the inspect expression valuye se to #false.

From Racket documentation Creating Classes:

Just as for structure types, an inspector controls access to the class’s fields, including private fields, and also affects comparisons using equal?.

Consider the following example:

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(define integer%
  (class object%

    (super-new)

    (inspect #false)

    (init-field [value 0])))

If we create a new integer% object we can see it’s field values.

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(new integer%)
;;  => (object:integer% 0)

And if we compare two fresh integer% objects they will be equal.

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(equal? (new integer%) (new integer%))
;;  => #true

Intro

Instead of changing CSS style for Your Racket projects documentation, You may be interested in compiling Markdown files generated form Scribble source into HTML documentation website.

Creating MkDocs project

1. Create docs directory and mkdocs.yml config file in current directory, along with a dummy index.md file in docs folder.

   1	mkdocs new .

2. Edit the name of the project.

   Replace Racket-Project with your project name.

   1 2	--- site_name: Racket-Project

Building Scribble

Generate markdown files form scribble documentation.

Replace Racket-Project.scrbl with path to your scribble documentation main source file.

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scribble --markdown --dest ./docs --dest-name index.md Racket-Project.scrbl

Building Markdown

Compile HTML documentation from the markdown source.

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mkdocs build

HTML files should appear in the site directory.

Running the server

Some features, like search for example are only available when running the mkdocs server.

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mkdocs serve

Caveats

Some scribble functions do not look good or work correctly for markdown-to-HTML compilation by MkDocs.

• table-of-contents - looks like a source block

• index-section - letter links do not work

Example configuration

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site_name: Racket-Ebuild
site_author: xgqt@riseup.net
site_description: library to ease ebuild creation
site_url: https://gitlab.com/gentoo-racket/racket-ebuild

repo_name: gentoo-racket/racket-ebuild
repo_url: https://gitlab.com/gentoo-racket/racket-ebuild

plugins:
  - search

theme:
  name: material

extra:
  social:
    - icon: fontawesome/brands/gitlab
      link: https://gitlab.com/gentoo-racket/racket-ebuild

Also see: Fast-Racket at Racket's GitHub Wiki

Creating binaries

You can create portable binaries with Racket's raco command! Use raco exe and raco distribute.

More -> https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/exe.html

Sample games

Racket provides a executable plt-games, when ran (from console) it opens a menu of miscellaneous games, among them: jewel, minesweeper, aces, spider, checkers. & more (20 games total).

Plots

You can plot data in 2d & 3d forms.

2D

Sample code:

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#lang racket/base
(require racket/gui/base racket/math plot)

(plot-new-window? #true)

(plot (function sin (- pi) pi #:label "y = sin(x)"))

3D

Sample code:

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#lang racket/base
(require racket/gui/base racket/math plot)

(plot-new-window? #true)

(plot3d
 (surface3d (lambda (x y) (* (cos x) (sin y)))
            (- pi) pi (- pi) pi)
 #:title "An R × R → R function"
 #:x-label "x" #:y-label "y" #:z-label "cos(x) sin(y)")

Browser

There's a included library to render web pages, just "(require browser)".

Sample code:

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#lang racket
(require browser)

(open-url "https://xgqt.gitlab.io/")

FFI

You can use Racket's Foreign Function Interface to interact with non-Racket libraries to make use of very fast libraries written in (mainly) FORTRAN & C.

For example sci uses FFI for CBLAS & LAPACK.

Parallelism

For greater speed up with parallel execution there are futures, places and distributed places (for distributed programming).