What to do about a crash in the #dtc animations language

General
1

I'm reading Don't Teach Coding Until You've Read This Book and working through some of the exercises there. Their code/languages are distributed with Dr. Racket, but the animations one crashes on my machine (Ubuntu 25.04). Here's one example:

#lang dtc/frames/animations

(animation `(1 2 3))

When I run that with F5, it prints "HI" and then after a moment, the entire Dr. Racket window goes poof! and disappears. In the terminal, I see:

(drracket:314334): 
exception raised by error display handler: internal error: attempt to deschedule the current thread in atomic mode; original exception raised: exception raised by exception handler: internal error: tried to deschedule a descheduled thread; original exception raised: internal error: attempt to deschedule the current thread in atomic mode
internal error: tried to reschedule a scheduled thread
internal error: terminated in atomic mode!

Any suggestions on how to fix that? It works on a Macbook, so it's something Linux- or Ubuntu-specific.

Also, the book says its homepage is https://www.dont-teach.com/coding -- but that site gives a 502 error. I've tried to contact the authors but have gotten no response. It would be great if the book's site was available, or at least had a page saying that it's been taken down.

(FWIW, it does look like the book's code is available at https://github.com/srfoster/dtc.)

2

After raco pkg install --auto dtc, which btw generated this error

ts-kata-util/katas/rendering/pict.rkt:9:9: module: identifier already required
at: translate
in: pict
also provided by: "../main.rkt"

in addition to lots of Scribble warnings, I ran the program. It printed HI to standard out, then after a long pause opened a window that displayed the digits 1, 2, 3, and then just a black screen.

So perhaps running in DrRacket is the issue?

4

Doesn't work for me if run as a script outside of DrRacket: see https://gist.github.com/dandrake/72cbbf2bac0a410c34214493da8fa106 for the output. A bunch of invalid memory references, internal errors, and such.

(Discourse isn't letting me post a link to gist.github, for some reason...)

6

The source locations in that link include /home/dan/.local/share/racket/8.12/, which suggests that you are using Racket 8.12 from February 2024. Have you tried with the latest Racket 8.17? It's possible you are encountering a bug that has already been fixed.

7

I get the same behavior with 8.17.