What's official racket and what's not?

I have a very simple rule of thumb. If it is in the Racket distribution downloadable from https://download.racket-lang.org/ it is official and ready. This includes many languages, a good IDE, the web server, GUI/graphics framework, network libraries and much much more.

It is important to note that everything in the distribution has had extensive testing and apart from new features mentioned in the release announcement and months or years of real-world use.

If you have to use raco pkg install <package-name> you should check the package to be sure it is something you are happy to install and use.

I’ll give an example. You can check 1d6 - you might be happy to use it for some dice rolling but as it lacks licence metadata you would want to check the LICENCE file before integrating it into your project.

Racket is different to some other languages in that you don’t just install the language, you get a huge set of libraries and tools and at least seven languages (probably more). I’m guessing this is necessary because university IT departments don’t like students (or professors :sob:) installing software on lab computers, so the Racket distribution has to include everything they might need for anything from an introduction to programming class to a higher level course in programming language design & implementation.

I hope this helps,
Best regards,
Stephen
:beetle:


1d6

A partial implementation of the Troll dice-rolling language in Racket.

Build status: ok passing tests missing license metadata