Racket v8.17 draft Release Notes

[jbclements]

Here are the current draft release notes, let me know about things that are incorrect or missing!

---

• The package manager computes checksums for packages when required,
  allowing the use and automatic upgrade of packages without them.
• The bitwise-first-bit-set function returns the smallest bit that
  is set in the twos-complement representation of the given number.
• Dynamic-require makes it easier to use syntax bindings by allowing a
  syntax-thunk (or 'eval) to be used for them.
• The error-module-path->string-handler parameter allows the
  customization of the display of module-paths in error messages.
• Precision of certain numeric functions (sin, cos, and others) is
  improved on Windows platforms by using the MSVCRT/UCRT libraries.
  The string-append function has improved performance and reduced
  memory use for long lists of strings in the Racket CS
  implementation. Differences are clearly noticeable for lists of
  length 1 million.
• TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE, instructing the kernel to send periodic
  messages while waiting for data to check whether the connection is
  still responsive
• Racket code using a windows terminal can receive mouse events as
  virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode.
• The #:replace-malformed-surrogate? keyword can be used to specify
  a replacement for malformed unicode surrogates in JSON input
• The http-client module no longer sends "Content-Length: 0" for
  requests without a body.
• The demodularizer (compiler/demod) can prune more unused
  assignments
• Several judgment rendering forms in Redex are replaced by
  functions, allowing more convenient abstraction.
• The new drracket-core package provides a version of drracket with
  a smaller set of dependencies.
• The language menu, including the configuration sub-pane, have
  improved for installations that have no user-facing languages
  installed.
• Typed Racket has support for treelists.
• Racket and Typed Racket have better support for block-diagonal
  matrices.
• The math library contains improved implementations of acos and
  matrix-(cos-)angle.
• The stepper again works for big-bang programs.
• There are many other repairs and documentation imprevements!

The following people contributed to this release:

Alexander Shopov, Andrei Dorian Duma, Bert De Ketelaere, Bob Burger,
Bogdan Popa, Bogdana Vereha, Cameron Moy, Chung-chieh Shan, Cutie
Deng, D. Ben Knoble, Dario Hamidi, Dominik Pantůček, Gustavo
Massaccesi, halfminami, Jacqueline Firth, Jason Hemann, Jens Axel
Søgaard, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jordan Harman, Marc
Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber,
Noah Ma, owaddell-ib, Philippe Meunier, Robby Findler, Ryan
Culpepper, Ryan Ficklin, Sam Phillips, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung
You, sogaiu, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Vincent
Lee, and Wing Hei Chan.

---

[soegaard]

@jbclements

Racket code using a windows terminal can receive mouse events as
virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode.

Is it possible somehow to mention that this already works on macOS and Linux?

[jbclements]

It does? I spent a while looking for a chunk of example code, I definitely felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. If I just use read-char/special on macOS, do I get mouse movement messages?

[samth]

Dynamic-require makes it easier to use syntax bindings by allowing a

dynamic-require should be referecend as a function.

The string-append function

This should be a new bullet.

TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE

SO_KEEPALIVE should be in tt font.

Several judgment rendering forms in Redex

Redex does not have a capital letter in any of the actual identifiers in Racket.

The stepper again works for big-bang programs.

big-bang is an identifier

Racket and Typed Racket have better support for block-diagonal

Isn't this actually about the math library?

The language menu, including the configuration sub-pane, have
improved for installations that have no user-facing languages
installed.

What "user facing languages" are should be explained better.

[soegaard]

@dominik.pantucek You are the best to answer this one.

[jbclements]

First, and clearly most important... how did you manage to intersperse responses to bullets like that? Did you have to quote each one you were responding to separately ? Email was nicer here, sigh.

@samth

Dynamic-require makes it easier to use syntax bindings by allowing a

dynamic-require should be referecend as a function.

Done

@samth

The string-append function

This should be a new bullet.

Done

@samth

TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE

SO_KEEPALIVE should be in tt font.

Okay, this actually raises a question. What I'm using here is scribble that generates text and also markdown, so the real question I have for you is what specific textual and markdown elements you'd like to see here. Would backticks be sufficient? Would you prefer a <code> tag in markdown?

@samth

Several judgment rendering forms in Redex

Redex does not have a capital letter in any of the actual identifiers in Racket.

Removed the backticks

@samth

The stepper again works for big-bang programs.

big-bang is an identifier

Backticked

@samth

Racket and Typed Racket have better support for block-diagonal

Isn't this actually about the math library?

reworded

@samth

The language menu, including the configuration sub-pane, have
improved for installations that have no user-facing languages
installed.

What "user facing languages" are should be explained better.

Yeah, actually I already wrote to Robby to see if he could help me with the wording on this. I agree that this is not acceptable yet.

Here's my revised copy.

---

• The package manager computes checksums for packages when required,
  allowing the use and automatic upgrade of packages without them.
• The bitwise-first-bit-set function returns the smallest bit that
  is set in the twos-complement representation of the given number.
• The dynamic-require form makes it easier to use syntax bindings by
  allowing a syntax-thunk (or 'eval) to be used for them.
• The error-module-path->string-handler parameter allows the
  customization of the display of module-paths in error messages.
• Precision of certain numeric functions (sin, cos, and others) is
  improved on Windows platforms by using the MSVCRT/UCRT libraries.
• The string-append function has improved performance and reduced
  memory use for long lists of strings in the Racket CS
  implementation. Differences are clearly noticeable for lists of
  length 1 million.
• TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE, instructing the kernel to send periodic
  messages while waiting for data to check whether the connection is
  still responsive
• Racket code using a windows terminal can receive mouse events as
  virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode.
• The #:replace-malformed-surrogate? keyword can be used to specify
  a replacement for malformed unicode surrogates in JSON input
• The http-client module no longer sends "Content-Length: 0" for
  requests without a body.
• The demodularizer (compiler/demod) can prune more unused
  assignments
• Several judgment rendering forms in Redex are replaced by functions,
  allowing more convenient abstraction.
• The new drracket-core package provides a version of drracket with
  a smaller set of dependencies.
• The language menu, including the configuration sub-pane, have
  improved for installations that have no user-facing languages
  installed.
• Typed Racket has support for treelists.
• The math library has better support for block-diagonal matrices,
  including both Racket and Typed Racket.
• The math library contains improved implementations of acos and
  matrix-(cos-)angle.
• The stepper again works for big-bang programs.
• There are many other repairs and documentation imprevements!

The following people contributed to this release:

Alexander Shopov, Andrei Dorian Duma, Bert De Ketelaere, Bob Burger,
Bogdan Popa, Bogdana Vereha, Cameron Moy, Chung-chieh Shan, Cutie
Deng, D. Ben Knoble, Dario Hamidi, Dominik Pantůček, Gustavo
Massaccesi, halfminami, Jacqueline Firth, Jason Hemann, Jens Axel
Søgaard, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jordan Harman, Marc
Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber,
Noah Ma, owaddell-ib, Philippe Meunier, Robby Findler, Ryan
Culpepper, Ryan Ficklin, Sam Phillips, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung
You, sogaiu, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Vincent
Lee, and Wing Hei Chan.

---

[samth]

@jbclements

First, and clearly most important... how did you manage to intersperse responses to bullets like that? Did you have to quote each one you were responding to separately ? Email was nicer here, sigh.

If you select text in the web interface there's a quote button.

@jbclements

@samth

TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE

SO_KEEPALIVE should be in tt font.

Okay, this actually raises a question. What I'm using here is scribble that generates text and also markdown, so the real question I have for you is what specific textual and markdown elements you'd like to see here. Would backticks be sufficient? Would you prefer a <code> tag in markdown?

Yes backticks are fine.

For prioritization, I think the most significant ones are: drracket-core, treelists in TR, package manager checksums.

[jbclements]

@samth

@jbclements

First, and clearly most important... how did you manage to intersperse responses to bullets like that? Did you have to quote each one you were responding to separately ? Email was nicer here, sigh.

If you select text in the web interface there's a quote button.

Yes, but when you do that you get a separate quote block for each piece; you can see the person's name at the top of each block. I see that for your most recent message, but not for your first one in this thread, suggesting you did something different there. Perhaps you manually inserted not-quote quote pairs? Not sure. Not important.

@samth

@jbclements

@samth

TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE

SO_KEEPALIVE should be in tt font.

Okay, this actually raises a question. What I'm using here is scribble that generates text and also markdown, so the real question I have for you is what specific textual and markdown elements you'd like to see here. Would backticks be sufficient? Would you prefer a <code> tag in markdown?

Yes backticks are fine.

Done

@samth

For prioritization, I think the most significant ones are: drracket-core, treelists in TR, package manager checksums.

Agreed, updated. New version:

---

• The new drracket-core package provides a version of drracket with
  a smaller set of dependencies.
• Typed Racket has support for treelists.
• The package manager computes checksums for packages when required,
  allowing the use and automatic upgrade of packages without them.
• The bitwise-first-bit-set function returns the smallest bit that
  is set in the twos-complement representation of the given number.
• The dynamic-require form makes it easier to use syntax bindings by
  allowing a syntax-thunk (or 'eval) to be used for them.
• The error-module-path->string-handler parameter allows the
  customization of the display of module-paths in error messages.
• Precision of certain numeric functions (sin, cos, and others) is
  improved on Windows platforms by using the MSVCRT/UCRT libraries.
• The string-append function has improved performance and reduced
  memory use for long lists of strings in the Racket CS
  implementation. Differences are clearly noticeable for lists of
  length 1 million.
• TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE, instructing the kernel to send
  periodic messages while waiting for data to check whether the
  connection is still responsive
• Racket code using a windows terminal can receive mouse events as
  virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode.
• The #:replace-malformed-surrogate? keyword can be used to specify
  a replacement for malformed unicode surrogates in JSON input
• The http-client module no longer sends "Content-Length: 0" for
  requests without a body.
• The demodularizer (compiler/demod) can prune more unused
  assignments
• Several judgment rendering forms in Redex are replaced by functions,
  allowing more convenient abstraction.
• The language menu, including the configuration sub-pane, have
  improved for installations that have no user-facing languages
  installed.
• The math library has better support for block-diagonal matrices,
  including both Racket and Typed Racket.
• The math library contains improved implementations of acos and
  matrix-(cos-)angle.
• The stepper again works for big-bang programs.
• There are many other repairs and documentation imprevements!

The following people contributed to this release:

Alexander Shopov, Andrei Dorian Duma, Bert De Ketelaere, Bob Burger,
Bogdan Popa, Bogdana Vereha, Cameron Moy, Chung-chieh Shan, Cutie
Deng, D. Ben Knoble, Dario Hamidi, Dominik Pantůček, Gustavo
Massaccesi, halfminami, Jacqueline Firth, Jason Hemann, Jens Axel
Søgaard, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jordan Harman, Marc
Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber,
Noah Ma, owaddell-ib, Philippe Meunier, Robby Findler, Ryan
Culpepper, Ryan Ficklin, Sam Phillips, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung
You, sogaiu, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Vincent
Lee, and Wing Hei Chan.

---

[samth]

For most of those I copied and pasted manually.

One last note: dynamic-require is a procedure not a syntactic form.

[dominik.pantucek]

@soegaard

@dominik.pantucek You are the best to answer this one.

Hehe, I'll try my best

@soegaard

@jbclements

Racket code using a windows terminal can receive mouse events as
virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode.

Is it possible somehow to mention that this already works on macOS and Linux?

@jbclements

It does? I spent a while looking for a chunk of example code, I definitely felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. If I just use read-char/special on macOS, do I get mouse movement messages?

Yes, it does - if you enable that. In tui-term[1], there's a procedure just for that: term-enable-mouse[2]. On Linux and/or a Mac, it just sends SET_ANY_EVENT_MOUSE and SET_SGR_EXT_MODE_MOUSE VT/ANSI/ECMA sequences. See the source[3].

The Windows Console support gets "injected" into the whole layered support in [4] using a "platform hook". Windows is the only platform, where this operates on a completely different layer than one would expect. The actual hook is then passed along as the last field of the tterm struct as [5].

Yup, jumping hoops thru loops only to:

• either send "\x1b[?1003h\x1b[?1006h" to the standard output, or
• update ConsoleMode on hStdin with bits #x290 set to one and cleared bit #x40

I plan to provide some example code in the tui-term package, however this is pretty low-level and I think only TUI toolkit authors would even want to use it. Ok, perhaps cursor positioning in expeditor using mouse is another cool feature someone might implement, but that's about it

[1] TUI Terminal Support
[2] 2 Virtual Terminal
[3] term/vt-output-port.rkt · master · Dominik Joe Pantůček / tui-term · GitLab
[4] term/tty-input-port.rkt · master · Dominik Joe Pantůček / tui-term · GitLab
[5] term/tty.rkt · master · Dominik Joe Pantůček / tui-term · GitLab

[jbclements]

Well, I think a link to your code and a parenthetical comment is maybe the way to go, here. Here's what I've got now:

---

• The new drracket-core package provides a version of drracket with
  a smaller set of dependencies.
• Typed Racket has support for treelists.
• The package manager computes checksums for packages when required,
  allowing the use and automatic upgrade of packages without them.
• The bitwise-first-bit-set function returns the smallest bit that
  is set in the twos-complement representation of the given number.
• The updated dynamic-require function makes it easier to use syntax
  bindings by allowing a syntax-thunk (or 'eval) to be used for them.
• The error-module-path->string-handler parameter allows the
  customization of the display of module-paths in error messages.
• Precision of certain numeric functions (sin, cos, and others) is
  improved on Windows platforms by using the MSVCRT/UCRT libraries.
• The string-append function has improved performance and reduced
  memory use for long lists of strings in the Racket CS
  implementation. Differences are clearly noticeable for lists of
  length 1 million.
• TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE, instructing the kernel to send
  periodic messages while waiting for data to check whether the
  connection is still responsive
• Racket code using a terminal in Windows can receive mouse events as
  virtual terminal characters after using SetConsoleMode. (This is
  also already possible on macOS and Linux.) See the tui-term
  package for related example code.
• The #:replace-malformed-surrogate? keyword can be used to specify
  a replacement for malformed unicode surrogates in JSON input
• The http-client module no longer sends "Content-Length: 0" for
  requests without a body.
• The demodularizer (compiler/demod) can prune more unused
  assignments
• Several judgment rendering forms in Redex are replaced by functions,
  allowing more convenient abstraction.
• When a distribution includes no teaching languages, DrRacket’s
  language-dialog configuration moves into the preferences dialog and
  the “Language” menu disappears.
• The math library has better support for block-diagonal matrices,
  including both Racket and Typed Racket.
• The math library contains improved implementations of acos and
  matrix-(cos-)angle.
• The stepper again works for big-bang programs.
• There are many other repairs and documentation imprevements!

The following people contributed to this release:

Alexander Shopov, Andrei Dorian Duma, Bert De Ketelaere, Bob Burger,
Bogdan Popa, Bogdana Vereha, Cameron Moy, Chung-chieh Shan, Cutie
Deng, D. Ben Knoble, Dario Hamidi, Dominik Pantůček, Gustavo
Massaccesi, halfminami, Jacqueline Firth, Jason Hemann, Jens Axel
Søgaard, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jordan Harman, Marc
Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber,
Noah Ma, owaddell-ib, Philippe Meunier, Robby Findler, Ryan
Culpepper, Ryan Ficklin, Sam Phillips, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung
You, sogaiu, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen De Gabrielle, Vincent
Lee, and Wing Hei Chan.

---

[jbclements]

Got it, many thanks.