2025-01-31-racket-v8-16.md

Title: Racket v8.16
Date: 2025-01-31T13:12:00
Tags: release-announcement, DRAFT
Authors: John Clements, Stephen De Gabrielle

posted by Stephen De Gabrielle

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We are pleased to announce Racket v8.16 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/.

As of this release:

• Expanded support for immutable and mutable treelists

  • A variety of new treelist utility functions are available: treelist-filter, treelist-flatten, et cetera.
  • The mutable-treelist-prepend! function allows prepending to mutable treelists.
  • Mutable treelists are serializable.

• The serialize-structs module allows the minimization of dependencies by providing only a handful of core forms

• The flbit-field function allows access to the binary representation of IEEE floating-point numbers.

• The top-left search box in the documentation works once more.

• The XML reader is 2-3x faster on inputs with long CDATA and comments, and avoids some internal contract checks to obtain a 25% speedup on large documents generally.

• The pregexp syntax includes "\X" to match a grapheme cluster, following Perl and PCRE.

• The read-json* and write-json* functions allow customization of the Racket representation of JSON elements, eliminating the need for a separate "translation" pass.

• New port I/O functions

  • The open-input-nowhere function creates an empty input port.
  • The pipe-port? function makes it possible to determine whether a port is created by make-pipe.
  • The port-file-stat function allows gathering information about the file that is the source or target of a file-stream port.

• A revised representation of pointers improves the performance of foreign function calls.

  • ptr-ref and ptr-set! are substantially faster.
  • Details the FFI improvement (with some benchmarking results)

• In anticipation of the fifteenth RacketCon, the fifteenth function returns the fifteenth element of a list.

• Racket has an improved multi-line convention for error messages.

• The db library allows prepare on virtual statements.

• The student-t distribution is part of the math/distributions library.

• Expeditor supports customizing the prompt, using the prompt argument to call-with-expeditor.

• There is a guide to adding internationalization for a new (human) language.

• #lang htdp/asl incorporates Graphical Debugger support.

• There is lots of new documentation, and many defects repaired!

The following people contributed to this release:

a11ce, Alex Knauth, Alexander Shopov, Alexis King, Andrew Mauer-Oats, Anthony Carrico, Bert De Ketelaere, Bob Burger, Bogdan Popa, D. Ben Knoble, David Van Horn, Gustavo Massaccesi, halfminami, Hao Zhang, Jacqueline Firth, Jinser Kafka, JJ, John Clements, Jörgen Brandt, Kraskaska, lafirest, Laurent Orseau, lukejianu, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, mehbark, Mike Sperber, Noah Ma, Onorio Catenacci, Oscar Waddell, Pavel Panchekha, payneca, Robby Findler, Sam Phillips, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung You, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Wing Hei Chan, Yi Cao, and ZhangHao.

Thank you

The following people contributed to this release:

.

Racket is a community developed open source project and we welcome new contributors. See racket/README.md to learn how you can be a part of this amazing project.

Feedback Welcome

Questions and discussion welcome at the Racket community Discourse or Discord

Please share

If you can - please help get the word out to users and platform specific repo packagers

Racket - the Language-Oriented Programming Language - version 8.16 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org

See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2024/08/racket-v8-16.html for the release announcement and highlights.