Yesterday, I announced rackcheck, my new property-based testing library for Racket and I wanted to do a quick dive into one of the examples in the rackcheck repo where a simple web API is integration tested using PBT. You can find the full example here. The app being tested is a simple leaderboard HTTP API with 3 endpoints: GET /players: lists all the registered players in order from highest score to lowest.

I’ve been playing around with property-based testing in Racket this past week. I started by forking the existing quickcheck library to try and add support for shrinking, but I quickly realized that I’d have to make a number of breaking changes to get it to work the way I wanted so, in the end, I decided to start a new library from scratch. The library is called rackcheck and you can grab it off of the package server.

Racket’s built-in web-server package is great, but parts of it are low-level enough that it can be confusing to people who are new to the language. In this post, I’m going to try to clear up some of that confusion by providing some definitions and examples for things beginners might wonder about. Servlets A servlet is a function from a request to a response. It has the contract: 1 (-> request?

I’d been meaning to play with Racket’s built-in sandboxing capabilities for a while so yesterday I sat down and made Try Racket. It’s a web app that lets you type in Racket code and run it. The code you run is tied to your session and each session is allocated up to 60 seconds of run time per evaluation, with up to 128MB of memory used. Filesystem and network access is not permitted and neither is access to the FFI.

/u/myfreeweb pointed out to me in a lobste.rs thread yesterday that Racket compiles just fine on aarch64 and that led me down a rabbit hole trying to get Racket running inside an iOS application. I finally succeeded so I figured I’d write down my findings in hopes of helping future Racketeers (myself included) going down this path! Compile Racket for macOS A recent-enough version of Racket is required in order to compile Racket for iOS.

A couple of days ago, I released a native macOS application called Remember. It is a small, keyboard-driven application for stashing away notes/reminders for later. One of the cool things about it from a programming nerd perspective is that, while it is a completely native Cocoa application whose frontend is built with Swift, the core business logic is all in Racket! Why not use racket/gui? I started out with a proof of concept that used Racket for the GUI, but I realized that I’d have to write a bunch of Objective-C FFI code to get the UI to look the way I wanted (a carbon copy of Spotlight) and it seemed like it would be a pain to try and integrate DDHotKey and to add support for launching at login into a package that is easy to distribute.

I’ve been using org-mode capture templates for years and I’ve always wished I had something like that for the whole system. I took advantage of the holiday break to build Remember, a little reminders application with Spotlight-like UX. It’s available on Gumroad and you can pay what you want for it (inlcuding $0!) at the moment so I hope you’ll give it a go! Although the app isn’t Open Source, it source code is available on GitHub.

GitHub Actions are going to become generally-available next week so I created an action for installing Racket. You can find it on the marketplace. Here’s what a minimal CI configuration for a Racket package might look like:

I just open sourced one of the very first Racket code bases I’ve worked on. The project is called nemea and it’s a tiny, privacy-preserving, website analytics tracker. It doesn’t do anything fancy, but it does enough for my needs and, possibly, yours too so check it out!

Another Racket thing! redis-rkt is a new Redis client for Racket that I’ve been working on these past few weeks. Compared to the existing redis and rackdis packages, it: is fully documented, is safer due to strict use of contracts, is faster, supports more commands and its API tries to be idiomatic, rather than being just a thin wrapper around Redis commands. Check it out!