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.
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“Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)