[racket] Plugin Development

There should be no way to cross between a program running inside
DrRacket and the implementation of DrRacket (there are known bugs that
make it possible to cross, but they aren't going to lead to a pleasant
REPL experience).

You can ask DrRacket to make a simpler REPL for you via the PLTDRREPL
environment variable.

As far as units go, you need to be able to satisfy the imports to be
able to get at the insides of the unit. And for the unit you have in
particular, you would need to essentially provide the entire
implementation of DrRacket to satisfy the imports.

But, some of your functions may no depend on DrRacket proper, but only
on, say, GUI controls or other things like that. In that case, you can
move them outside of the unit and test and run them and just have
small amounts of code that calls into those functions from inside the
unit. I find that to be a useful mode of development for some things I
add to DrRacket.

hth,
Robby


On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Adam C.M. Solove <asolove at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the clarification.
>
> Before I abandon myself to working this way, let me try another possibility.
> I'd like to interactively try out the functions I'm writing, but I run into
> two conceptual blocks that expose some of my ignorance on Racket. First, as
> the functions are wrapped in a unit which has some imports, I can't seem to
> "get at" those functions from the repl, though I have a reference to the
> unit itself. Second, I assume that even if I could get to the functions in
> the repl, they would be running within the user program space rather than
> the DrRacket UI space. Is there any way to cross that bridge?
>
> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:30 PM, Robby Findler <robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>> Unfortunately, there is not. Depending on what your plugin does, it
>> isn't clear that it is really possible. In particular, if you're
>> mixing something new into the DrRacket frame then it is hard to know
>> what to do with all of the old frames now they should have a new
>> class.
>>
>> I agree it can be tedious, tho, and there could be a better design of
>> an extension API that would make that kind of thing easier (and also
>> make it easier to dynamically stop and start plugins) but we're not
>> there yet.
>>
>> Robby
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Adam C.M. Solove <asolove at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hello all,
>> >
>> > I'm new to the Racket ecosystem and poking around with the plugin system
>> > to
>> > see how hard it would be to build a minikanren debugger tool in
>> > DrRacket.
>> > But first, a much more basic question:
>> >
>> > Is there a good way to interactively write and test DrRacket plugins?
>> >
>> > I'm currently going through the plugin docs by making a small change,
>> > quitting and restarting DrRacket, seeing that it doesn't quite work,
>> > making
>> > another small change, etc. It's a bit frustrating. Is there a way to
>> > simply
>> > reload the plugin I'm working on while leaving my DrRacket session
>> > alive?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > Adam
>> >
>> > ____________________
>> >   Racket Users list:
>> >   http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
>> >
>
>