[racket-dev] Release Announcement for v5.2.1, second draft

There's no mention of the new icons at all now (not the library).
Superficial, but will probably make many happy.


Two hours ago, Ryan Culpepper wrote:
> * Performance improvements include the use of epoll()/kqueue()
>    instead of select() for the Racket thread scheduler,
>    cross-module inlining of small functions, and the use of SSE
>    instead of x87 for JIT-compiled floating-point operations on
>    platforms where SSE is always available (including x86_64
>    platforms). A related change is the interning of literal
>    numbers, strings, byte strings, characters, and regexps that
>    appear in code and syntax objects.
> 
> * MysterX's ActiveX support [...]

This should move down, since it's very unpopular.


> * The performance of Redex's matcher has been substantially
>    improved; depending on the model you should see improvements
>    between 2x and 50x in the time it takes to reduce terms.
> 
> * The `typecheck-fail' form allows macro creators to customize the
>    error messages that Typed Racket produces.  This is especially
>    useful when creating pattern matching macros.

It's not clear on a quick glance that this is a TR thing.  (Also,
"customize" sounds a little like underselling it, but maybe there's no
good way to talk about what can be done with it.)


> * The `2htdp/universe' library's `big-bang' form supports an
>    experimental game pad key handler.

Maybe move this one up a little?


> * In the DMdA teaching languages, infinite recursive signatures
>    ("streams", for example) with no intervening `mixed' are now
>    supported, and the signatures of record definitions without
>    fields now have generators for use with `property'.

And this one down?


> * The `db' library now supports nested transactions and PostgreSQL
>    arrays. Bugs involving MySQL authentication and memory corruption
>    in the SQLite bindings have been fixed.
> 
> * The Macro Stepper tool in DrRacket no longer executes a program
>    after expanding it.
> 
> * Plots look nicer, render up to 4 times faster, and are more
>    correct at very small and very large scales. New features
>    include customizable dual axis ticks and transforms (e.g. log
>    axes, date and currency ticks, axis interval collapse and
>    stretch), stacked histograms, and 3D vector fields. The legacy
>    `fit' function and libfit have been removed.

"up to 4 times faster" sounds fishy -- I think that just "faster"
sounds better.  Also, should move up.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!