Racket v8.0

posted by John Clements

Racket version 8.0 is now available from https://racket-lang.org/.

* Racket 8.0 is here!*

Racket 8.0 marks the first release where Racket CS is the default implementation. Creating, polishing, and adopting Racket CS has been a 4-year effort involving the entire Racket community. At this point, Racket CS is faster, easier to maintain and develop, and compatible with existing Racket programs. Racket CS will continue to improve, but at this point it is ready to be the primary variant of Racket for all Racketeers. More details about the current state of Racket CS are available in the recent blog post.

Other notable changes:

• Racket CS has better parallel garbage collection, a 10%–30% reduction in the size of generated code, and various targeted optimizations.

• A rewrite of the test-engine package allows the #lang versions of teaching languages to produce linked test-failure messages.

• The release comes with a new mark-up DSL for composing text to appear in the REPL (simple-tree-text-markup).

• Redex has an added define-overriding-judgment form and improved error source location reporting.

• Windows scrolling speed reflects the system preference.

• The db package uses the utf8mb4 charset for MySQL connections.

The following people contributed to this release:

Alex Harsányi, Alex Knauth, Alexander Shopov, Alexis King, Bert De Ketelaere, Bogdan Popa, Cameron Moy, David Van Horn, Davis Silverman, Dominik Pantůček, Florian Weimer, Fred Fu, Gustavo Massaccesi, Jack Firth, James Wilcox, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jonathan Chan, Lîm Tsú-thuàn, Mark, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Michael Ballantyne, Mike Sperber, Paulo Matos, Pavel Panchekha, Peter Zhong, Phil Nguyen, Philip McGrath, Robby Findler, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Sergiu Ivanov, Shu-Hung You, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stefan Schwarzer, Stephen Chang, Stephen De Gabrielle, Walter H. Yang, WarGrey Gyoudmon Ju, kurinoku, xxyzz, and yjqww6