Racket v8.16 draft release notes

[spdegabrielle]

Updated
I’ll admit I’ve forgotten how to determine documentation links- I think they have to wait till the release is live.

S.

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• 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.

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