A modest Racket success story...

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Seamus Brady

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Feb 16, 2018, 7:49:22 AM2/16/18
to Racket Users
Hi all

At the risk of self promotion I have decided to share my modest Racket success story with the list and say thanks :)
Hopefully it might provide a small bit of inspiration.
I have a small open source WordPress development environment tool called InstantWP (a quick search will find it).
It is used by beginners to learn WordPress - it is a wrapper around QEMU with a small Alpine Linux installation.
The backend is written in Perl but the GUI is written in Racket.
I searched for nearly a year for a suitable graphics toolkit and settled on Racket above multiple commercial and open source alternatives.
The GUI library is rock solid and has given me no trouble. 
This version of the software has been downloaded nearly 40,000 times across the world from Japan to France.
I have had zero issues with the GUI across all those Windows and macOS machines. None. 

I am not the world's greatest Racket programmer and the GUI on InstantWP is quite simple, but even so, I can highly recommend using Racket for a commercial product.
The tooling is great, the libraries are rock solid and the community and language are fun and helpful.

So thanks to everyone behind Racket! And if anyone is thinking of using Racket for desktop software - go for it.
In my opinion, Racket probably has one of the best GUI toolkits out there at the moment. 

Regards

Seamus



Matthias Felleisen

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Feb 16, 2018, 9:26:09 AM2/16/18
to Seamus Brady, Racket Users

This is cool and thanks for sharing.

When you have made the first $1B from your freeware, please keep us in mind :)
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stewart mackenzie

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Feb 16, 2018, 4:21:05 PM2/16/18
to Matthias Felleisen, Seamus Brady, Racket Users
Hi Seamus,

Thanks for this, I'm setting out to build a rather large project using
Racket and its GUI.
I thought about using Idris compiling to the electron platform but
chose against it because of electron's memory usage.

So far my dive into Racket has positive, it's magical how I can switch
from untyped Racket to typed Racket simply by changing #lang.
Banging out my thoughts in a beautiful lisp 1, wave a finger, then
finger crack to type check. Just sublime.

In theme with this thread I'd also like to express my thanks to this
community, I certainly hope projects like Hackett come to maturity!

Might be a good time to ask on VeriRacket? Is this a thing, or is it
still in a red box? [1]

kr/sjm

[1] pg 25 https://con.racket-lang.org/2015/felleisen.pdf

Matthias Felleisen

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Feb 16, 2018, 6:05:55 PM2/16/18
to stewart mackenzie, Seamus Brady, Racket Users

Still red box. One day ..
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