[racket] Contracts and submodules

One thing I would find very useful is a blog post giving an overview
of where its more appropriate to use Racket without using contracts,or
 Racket using contracts or Typed Racket. Also an overview of the speed
issues would be very useful..  For example I know there is a cost to
contracts, but I'm not clear how Typed Racket compares in efficiency
to Racket with contracts. And also I've seen posts where a member said
he didn't use Typed Racket for his customer applications because of
efficiency, but I also vaguely recall seeing a post where a user said
that because of the type information given that a certain program was
compiled more efficiently than if it hadn't been given the type
information, so I'm unclear about the efficiency issues with Typed
Racket.

Thanks,
Harry Spier

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> On Nov 29, 2012, at 10:29 PM, Greg Hendershott wrote:
>
>> AFIK these subtleties of contracts and modules arise with
>> `provide/contract' -- by saying that the function should only use a
>> contract outside the module (or submodule).
>>
>> But I prefer to use `define/contract'. For one thing, I think it's
>> easier and more-maintainable to group the contract near/with its
>> function in the source. But I also prefer it on the starting
>> assumption that if a procedure is worth contracting at all, it's worth
>> contracting all the time -- inside the module as well as outside.
>
>
> This is a complete misunderstanding. Contracts are specifications
> that govern the flow of values across boundaries. We call this boundary
> a 'module' but for several years now, module and #lang have been two
> distinct terms. In this spirit,
>
>  -- #lang with provide contract-out is a module
>  -- define/contract is a module
>  -- internal modules are modules but watch out for module+
>
> In contrast,
>  -- units and classes are values and we have contracts for them
>         but they do NOT establish contract boundaries, they are
>         NOT modules.
>
> In your specific case, define/contract splits an existing 'module'
> into two pieces.
>
> ;; ---
>
> As I have said many times, your use of contract is likely to be
> much better satisfied with the use of Typed Racket. I doubt that
> many of your contracts are checking more than constructors, which
> roughly corresponds to type checking. For the remaining ones, Sam
> will provide
>
>   provide/typed with contract-out
>   require/typed with contract-in
>
>         ANY TIME SOON NOW.
>
> ;; ---
>
>
> As for performance of contracts:
>
> On Nov 29, 2012, at 11:47 PM, Harry Spier wrote:
>
>> And then to enable/disable contracts you can use the method Mathias
>> pointed out here.
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/users@racket-lang.org/msg12281.html
>
>
> Thanks for reminding the list of this post. I should write this
> out as a blog post or an entry into our Contract Guide.
>
>
>
>
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