Applications and Practical Use
Apart from having a basis in programming language theory, Racket was designed to be used as a general-purpose language in production systems. Thus, the Racket distribution features an extensive library that covers systems and network programming, web development, a uniform interface to the underlying operating system, a dynamic foreign function interface, several flavours of regular expressions, lexer/parser generators, logic programming, and a complete GUI framework, to name a few.
The design decision to make Racket a practical language has implications beyond the library, too. Those include Racket's ability to generate standalone executables under Windows, Mac OS X and Unix, a profiler and debugger included in the integrated development environment (IDE) and a unit testing framework.
Racket has been used for commercial projects and web applications. A notable example is the Hacker News website, which runs on Arc, which is developed in Racket. Naughty Dog has used it as a scripting language in several of their video games.
Read more about this topic: Dr Racket
Famous quotes containing the word practical:
“Missionaries, whether of philosophy or religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)