Racket Compiler and Runtime Status • Hacker News Board

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#71

Post by fern2000 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:27 PM UTC

rscho wrote: post #66

fern2000 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Knuth once said, “Premature Optimisation is the root of all evil!” But that message has obviously not yet reached the Racket community. Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! [1] Meanwhile, for example, we can still count the number of web applications written in Racket on the fingers of one hand,…

Racket positions itself mainly as an education and research platform. Yes, this is what puts food on the table of academics. I don't understand your criticism. Racket is very impressive in many ways, but making a run-of-the-mill webapp in two lines is not one of them. IMO, thinking that nothing important came out of Racket reseachwise is a highly uninformed opinion. I mean, dependent type systems as macros (therefore…

Yes, I'm aware that Racket is mainly education and research platform; that's exactly what I said in my previous post.

Racket is not well-suited for practical web-programming. Proof: For Python or Ruby, there are dozens of books explaining how to write web applications in them. But there's not a single good book for Racket (not just for web programming, but for anything).

Racket's authors use racket for their academic jerk-offs, but don't fog our eyes and tell us it's a practical language for real programmers, when it isn't.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#72

Post by fern2000 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

ojnabieoot wrote: post #70

fern2000 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Knuth once said, “Premature Optimisation is the root of all evil!” But that message has obviously not yet reached the Racket community. Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! [1] Meanwhile, for example, we can still count the number of web applications written in Racket on the fingers of one hand,…

> Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! This is just a blatant misunderstanding of what Racket on Chez is trying to do, and a very limited understanding of what “optimization” means for something as complex as a compiler/interpreter. The point of the Chez backend is to improve maintainability and portabi…

I think the case is simple here: Racket community was not capable of producing good programming language, so instead they decided to take someone else's better implementation: they decided to abandon the years and years of their efforts, because they realized that Kent Dybvig (a real hero i this story!) was better than all of them. That's why they decided to take his Chez scheme and parasitate on his effort.

The very fact that they did this tells us a lot about Racket's community “achievements”!

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#73

Post by rscho » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:34 PM UTC

fern2000 wrote: post #69

samth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which topics are taboo? That documentation is good? Or that academic use and industry use are different? Those topics are well discussed in the community. On the other hand, negative ranting about how everyone is wasting their time, how particular people are terrible, or how charging money for a book is inappropriate -- those are discouraged, and thankfully.

Come on, samth! Charging money for a book is not inappropriate. But charging (a lot of) money for a very lousy book are just pathetic. Did you ever read any of Jesse Alama's books? Thank God you didn't. That guy is tipical Racket community parasite: he parasitizes on your efforts and pains by charging his bad books, thus destroying the reputation of the entire community who turns out unable to write a fair book on ho…

Yeah, I think everyone understands that you have an axe to grind with Jesse. As for the docs: searchable? check; examples? check; narrative about what is happening? check. What's missing?

Are you going to tell us all books about your pet language are worth their price? How is that the community's problem?

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#74

Post by rscho » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

fern2000 wrote: post #71

rscho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racket positions itself mainly as an education and research platform. Yes, this is what puts food on the table of academics. I don't understand your criticism. Racket is very impressive in many ways, but making a run-of-the-mill webapp in two lines is not one of them. IMO, thinking that nothing important came out of Racket reseachwise is a highly uninformed opinion. I mean, dependent type systems as macros (therefore…

Yes, I'm aware that Racket is mainly education and research platform; that's exactly what I said in my previous post. Racket is not well-suited for practical web-programming. Proof: For Python or Ruby, there are dozens of books explaining how to write web applications in them. But there's not a single good book for Racket (not just for web programming, but for anything). Racket's authors use racket for their academic…

I'm sorry, but it's like complaining that Haskell is not a practical language. If you want to do production work, then why not focus on languages that are geared towards that? There are a lot of choices out there...

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#75

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

fern2000 wrote: post #69

samth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which topics are taboo? That documentation is good? Or that academic use and industry use are different? Those topics are well discussed in the community. On the other hand, negative ranting about how everyone is wasting their time, how particular people are terrible, or how charging money for a book is inappropriate -- those are discouraged, and thankfully.

Come on, samth! Charging money for a book is not inappropriate. But charging (a lot of) money for a very lousy book are just pathetic. Did you ever read any of Jesse Alama's books? Thank God you didn't. That guy is tipical Racket community parasite: he parasitizes on your efforts and pains by charging his bad books, thus destroying the reputation of the entire community who turns out unable to write a fair book on ho…

Stuffers are a very low level part of the webserver. I had no idea they exist until now. It's better to link to https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/run.html

I'm running the webserver so the T.A. in my department in the university choose they preferred building/course/day/hour to work. They are ~400. The first year I was worried that the server would collapse or something. Now I assume it is working unless I get many angry emails. (I don't remember the last time I had problems, most of the emails are about changes in the available courses and other administrative stuff.)

Back to stuffer, you can use the default stuffer or just ignore that stuffers exist at all, unless your site is huge.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#76

Post by rscho » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

fern2000 wrote: post #72

ojnabieoot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! This is just a blatant misunderstanding of what Racket on Chez is trying to do, and a very limited understanding of what “optimization” means for something as complex as a compiler/interpreter. The point of the Chez backend is to improve maintainability and portabi…

I think the case is simple here: Racket community was not capable of producing good programming language, so instead they decided to take someone else's better implementation: they decided to abandon the years and years of their efforts, because they realized that Kent Dybvig (a real hero i this story!) was better than all of them. That's why they decided to take his Chez scheme and parasitate on his effort. The very…

This is a strange, strange view of things. I guess all languages running on LLVM are parasites too, then.

Did you know Idris also runs on Chez? Does that also say a lot about Edwin Brady's achievements?

This is pure nonsense.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#77

Post by zelphirkalt » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

fern2000 wrote: post #71

rscho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racket positions itself mainly as an education and research platform. Yes, this is what puts food on the table of academics. I don't understand your criticism. Racket is very impressive in many ways, but making a run-of-the-mill webapp in two lines is not one of them. IMO, thinking that nothing important came out of Racket reseachwise is a highly uninformed opinion. I mean, dependent type systems as macros (therefore…

Yes, I'm aware that Racket is mainly education and research platform; that's exactly what I said in my previous post. Racket is not well-suited for practical web-programming. Proof: For Python or Ruby, there are dozens of books explaining how to write web applications in them. But there's not a single good book for Racket (not just for web programming, but for anything). Racket's authors use racket for their academic…

Huh? Weird, I have written a blog website in what Racket offers, following the documentation you criticize in another comment and got it working. Even the not so easy to understand continuation based side of it came to me after reading it thoroughly. It is quite simple to setup your REST routes and all that.

If you are interested, you may refer to: https://github.com/ZelphirKaltstahl/racket-markdown-blog/tre...

I did never bring it online, as I never rented a server for it, but it definitely functions and I had some local posts, which I did not include in the repository.

Did you never have a software without documentation? I think that would be way worse than having a sort of OK documentation of a bare bones web framework, that is actually understandable, with careful reading.

The Racket mailing list is also very helpful and people there are helpful in my experience. Show them you tried and your attempt at things and they'll probably help you out. My only pain with it is, that they are on Google groups.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#78

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

ojnabieoot wrote: post #70

fern2000 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Knuth once said, “Premature Optimisation is the root of all evil!” But that message has obviously not yet reached the Racket community. Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! [1] Meanwhile, for example, we can still count the number of web applications written in Racket on the fingers of one hand,…

> Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! This is just a blatant misunderstanding of what Racket on Chez is trying to do, and a very limited understanding of what “optimization” means for something as complex as a compiler/interpreter. The point of the Chez backend is to improve maintainability and portabi…

I agree, but the paper you link has more than one year. Now the benchmarks are much better, and in most cases Racket CS is faster than Racket BC. I think the even point was a few month ago, but there were too many bugs (small bugs, in weird corner cases, but important enough to not switch until they were fixed).

If you don't mind crappy graphics with numbers pulled out of the air https://imgur.com/a/9r0aJzd The idea is trading a slower development speed for some time, to get more speed and features in the long run.

Perhaps the change in the slope in BC is too much, and the current speed of CS is greater than the imaginary speed of a version of BC in an universe where BC didn't happen. I hope the crappy graphic in Paintbrush is enough to make it clear that the numbers are pulled out of the air. Anyway, one of the hard fact of the blog post submitted here is that in most cases the current version of CS is faster than the current version of BC.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#79

Post by Decabytes » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

The main goal of the project from the Racket on Chez status 2018

> It would be nice if porting to Chez Scheme made every aspect of Racket magically faster. It hasn’t done that, but we have plenty of room for improvement; the performance results to date are a lower bound on performance, not an upper bound.

> Keep in mind that the original goal is not to have a faster Racket, but a better-implemented Racket with acceptable performance. The Racket-on-Chez implementation is far more maintainable and flexible than the current Racket implementation, so maybe we’re half-way there after one year of work.

The fact that the performance looks this good is a huge win. And the focus on maintainability over speed is a refreshing sight. This is the sort of practical solution that will allow Racket to be relevant for many years to come. Racket is a good all around Scheme, there are other schemes that do certain aspects of what Racket can do better, but as a whole Racket is a very complete package.

I have two main criticisms with Racket, which are totally fixable, and in large part due to Racket's history as an incubator for language oriented programming, developed by PhDs in Comp Sci. Racket is very Academic. The documentation is great, but it is written by other Academics and can be hard to grok. Same with example code. Sure if you are looking at the student languages and tutorials based on that it is more accessible, but the minute you are trying to write a complex GUI app in typed Racket, the tutorials and example code is few and far between. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm to dumb to be using the language, and I feel like I'm not the only one to get that feeling.

Also for a language that prides itself on Language Oriented Programming, I want to some more examples/tutorials that are not just using brain fuck language. These are fixable, and I admit some are just me problems, but I'm actively working to solve them in this space.

Re: Racket Compiler and Runtime Status

#80

Post by fern2000 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

rscho wrote: post #73

fern2000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, samth! Charging money for a book is not inappropriate. But charging (a lot of) money for a very lousy book are just pathetic. Did you ever read any of Jesse Alama's books? Thank God you didn't. That guy is tipical Racket community parasite: he parasitizes on your efforts and pains by charging his bad books, thus destroying the reputation of the entire community who turns out unable to write a fair book on ho…

Yeah, I think everyone understands that you have an axe to grind with Jesse. As for the docs: searchable? check; examples? check; narrative about what is happening? check. What's missing? Are you going to tell us all books about your pet language are worth their price? How is that the community's problem?

rscho, I'll believe you when I see you or someone else wrote some more complex web application in Racket, which works properly and is scalable.

All of this will not happen, of course, because there is no such application written in the Racket in the world (no wonder when the documentation is so awful!)

When there's at least one, let me know.