[racket] Plugin Development

Thanks! Moving the gui code separate from the tool has made development a
lot more pleasant.

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Robby Findler <robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>
wrote:

> 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
> >> >
> >
> >
>
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