[racket-dev] Dracula development

Thanks for the update, Carl.

As one datapoint, I'm quite sure that your experience with planet has
help us understand how to build a better one. Jay knows more, but from
my point of view your experience and dog-food eating were a huge help.
Thanks.

Robby

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Carl Eastlund <cce at racket-lang.org> wrote:
> Short, short version: I will be working on a new Dracula implementation; see
> https://github.com/carl-eastlund/dracula (currently just a bare Racket
> fork).
>
> ====
>
> Short version: While the "new Dracula" is still spiritually "ACL2 via
> Racket", the new one will be very different from the old.  It will be much
> more Rackety, have full use of Racket macros and modules, and have a much
> improved component system based very closely on ML functors.  It will also
> be distributed as a regular collection rather than as a planet package.
> Along with Dracula development, I will "spin off" some of my support
> libraries as new collections (or parts of existing ones).
>
> ====
>
> TL;DR:
>
> The implementation of my thesis is "almost ready for prime-time".  I want to
> push it out to the world soon.  I have not found Planet to be an ideal
> platform for an internal PLT developer trying to keep up with the
> development branch; I need to update my code far too often, and yet for
> clients I have to maintain compatibility with the released version.  I could
> probably resolve that if I wanted to maintain "stable" and "release"
> branches of my own project; I do not.  Our organization has a whole
> development and release infrastructure built around our core repository, and
> it has not been beneficial for me to work outside that for so long.
>
> In the meantime, my private Dracula development has built up a number of
> support libraries.  Some of them are superfluous and should just basically
> be "inlined" into the implementation, but some are also near-ready for
> release in their own right.  The top candidates are my debugging library,
> which is in the spirit of unstable/debug but significantly improved, and my
> pretty-printer which has a number of advantages over racket/pretty.  I have
> found both of these to be immensely useful in debugging programs with little
> errors buried under huge amounts of data.  I don't know if the unstable
> collection will be part of the life cycle for these collections; I've yet to
> pin down the best way to use unstable so it doesn't just turn into a code
> graveyard.  Probably these collections are better candidates than some of my
> previous attempts, in that I am actively developing them for a specific
> purpose and intend to push them out as stable collections before long.  In
> previous cases, I was just putting stuff "out there" and "seeing what
> happens".
>
> The old Dracula was a Racket model of ACL2: taking ACL2 programs, and
> simulating them in DrRacket so we could get the world teachpack and syntax
> checking.  The new Racket is an ACL2 model of Racket, designed to be much
> more along the lines of taking first- (and possibly second-)order Racket
> programs and certifying ACL2 models of them.  I don't know how precise that
> will be; the new ML-like components don't look much like anything we have
> natively in Racket.
>
> Anyway, the repository is up on Github, linked above.  Right now it's just a
> copy of plt/racket, but I'll be gradually pulling pieces of my private
> Dracula repo (which for various reasons I prefer to refactor into the Racket
> fork piecemeal rather than copy wholesale).
>
> Carl Eastlund
>
>
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