[racket] developing tools

On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Stephen De Gabrielle <
stephen.degabrielle at acm.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm starting to fiddle with DrRacket plugin ideas (again), and I was
> wondering if any tool developers can share their processes for developing
> tools,
>
> What I used to do was dump my tool in a collects directory and run 'raco
> -L toolname', followed by restarting-the-Doctor. If it failed I would
> remove the tool from /collects/ and restart again.
>

You don't need to remove it from collects but just recompile it with `raco
setup -D my-tool` (-D to avoid building the docs and save a few seconds).
But you still need to restart DrRacket.


> This is a bit frustrating as it can be quite time consuming, and I disable
> as many tools as possible to make restarts quicker.
>

It probably depends on what the tool does, but on some occasions you may
just need a well-placed `dynamic-require' in your tool, then you only need
to recompile the `dynamic-require'd modules without restarting DrRacket
(but these cases are meant to be covered by the script-plugin).

There are also cases where you can test the tool with a gracket frame
instead of the full DrRacket (look for `frame:text%' in the framework).

You can also try to use `drracket:frame:basics-mixin', which should give
you a full DrRacket frame to play with, but it's of course longer to load.

For the other cases, you probably need to restart DrRacket.

HTH,
Laurent
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20130831/53cf1f39/attachment.html>