proposed release notes for 8.2 release

[John Clements]

Here’s what I’ve got now. Any further additions or changes?


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Racket version 8.2 is now available from

https://racket-lang.org/


* Racket CS supports faster exact-rational arithmetic.

* Racket has improved support for layered and tethered installation.

* Racket CS supports nonatomic allocation via ffi/unsafe.

* The `raco cross` tool improves support for cross-compilation.

* DrRacket has performance improvements when editing files with
picts containing large bitmaps.

* Typed Racket more consistently refines field types of non-polymorphic structs.

* Printing of values is unified across the teaching language implementations and the stepper.

The following people contributed to this release:

Alex Harsányi, Alex Knauth, Amirouche, Andrew Mauer-Oats, Bob Burger,
Bogdan Popa, Cameron Moy, Crystal Jacobs, Dale Vaillancourt, Diego
A. Mundo, Fred Fu, Greg Hendershott, Gustavo Massaccesi, Jack Firth,
Jamie Taylor, Jarhmander, Jason Hemann, Jay McCarthy, Jeffrey D. Swan,
Jens Axel Søgaard, Jesse Alama, John Clements, Laurent Orseau,
Lazerbeak12345, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber, Nada
Amin, Noah Ma, Oscar Waddell, Paulo Matos, Pavel Panchekha, Philip
McGrath, Ray Racine, Robby Findler, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt,
Shu-Hung You, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Stephen Chang, Thorsten Blum,
Tony Garnock-Jones, WarGrey Gyoudmon Ju, William J. Bowman, Yu Fang,
and minor-change.

Feedback Welcome
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Matthew Flatt]

At Fri, 16 Jul 2021 03:50:18 +0000, "'John Clements' via Racket Developers" wrote:
> * The `raco cross` tool improves support for cross-compilation.

The `raco cross` tool is not in the main distribution, so maybe this
one should be

* Cross-compilation works fully with the `raco cross` tool, which is
distributed separately as the "raco-cross" package.

[John Clements]

Okay, got this one.

John

[Shu-Hung You]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Shu-Hung You <shh...@u.northwestern.edu>
Date: Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 3:34 PM
Subject: Re: [racket-dev] proposed release notes for 8.2 release
To: John Clements <clem...@brinckerhoff.org>, Racket Developers
<racke...@googlegroups.com>

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 10:50 PM 'John Clements' via Racket Developers
<racke...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> Here’s what I’ve got now. Any further additions or changes?
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Racket version 8.2 is now available from
>
> https://racket-lang.org/
>
>
> * Racket CS supports faster exact-rational arithmetic.

May I ask what is the baseline of the comparison? How about using "improved":

* Racket CS improved the performance of exact-rational arithmetic.

This eliminates the possible confusion that Racket BC is the
comparison target and the interpretation that arithmetic is fast in
Racket CS.

If this item is about samth's PR #3748, then its subject is large
integer arithmetic. I think it is worth narrowing the scope to let the
users know what to expect, e.g.

* Racket CS improved the performance of large-integer arithmetic.

https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/3748

(I guess the computation of rational numbers with large denominators
or numerators also benefits from it but I am not sure.)

[Sam Tobin-Hochstadt]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:54 PM Shu-Hung You <shh...@u.northwestern.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Shu-Hung You <shh...@u.northwestern.edu>
> Date: Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 3:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [racket-dev] proposed release notes for 8.2 release
> To: John Clements <clem...@brinckerhoff.org>, Racket Developers
> <racke...@googlegroups.com>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 10:50 PM 'John Clements' via Racket Developers
> <racke...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here’s what I’ve got now. Any further additions or changes?
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Racket version 8.2 is now available from
> >
> > https://racket-lang.org/
> >
> >
> > * Racket CS supports faster exact-rational arithmetic.
>
> May I ask what is the baseline of the comparison? How about using "improved":
>
> * Racket CS improved the performance of exact-rational arithmetic.
>
> This eliminates the possible confusion that Racket BC is the
> comparison target and the interpretation that arithmetic is fast in
> Racket CS.

I agree that this is an improvement.

> If this item is about samth's PR #3748, then its subject is large
> integer arithmetic. I think it is worth narrowing the scope to let the
> users know what to expect, e.g.
>
> * Racket CS improved the performance of large-integer arithmetic.
>
> https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/3748
>
> (I guess the computation of rational numbers with large denominators
> or numerators also benefits from it but I am not sure.)

That PR is also part of 8.2 but the notes are mostly referring to
https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/3818

Sam

[John Clements]

Many thanks, using this wording!

John