"I'd love to use Arc for my next project; if only it had..."
Assuming that you already like the language, but one or more practical aspects are holding you back from being able to actually use it when you want to, what are they?
The main insurmountable difficulty with Racket is garbage collections. Eventually (actually pretty frequently) there will be a major garbage collection (as opposed to a minor GC, in the context of a generational GC), which tends to take more than 100 milliseconds even with a bare minimum of objects allocated. That is a game-breaker for this sort of... game.
- A maintained, portable, stable, widely-available implementation.
- I'm iffy on whether Racket is widely-available enough for a Racket-based implementation to satisfy me.
- A module system.
- A package-distribution system.
- Better and more libraries, or a good, standard way to hook into racket's libraries.
- Depending on the project, a reasonably fast implementation.
On looking into the matter, it seems Racket is available on Windows and OS X, so that's basically taken care of. Hopefully its source compiles on non-x86{,_64} platforms as well, but I don't really develop for those.
I'd suggest just trying to compile it on whatever machine you might have in mind.
git clone http://git.racket-lang.org/plt.git
cd plt/src
./configure
make
make install # this builds executables and docs in place; takes a longish while
An active, vibrant developer community (like the one around Node.js)
There are of course a whole lot of thing I'd wish arc had, but the community is the most important aspect, if it was there, it could take care of all the details. The community would make the package management system, build decent libraries/packages, and make sure the implementation becomes widely available, etc.
There's a high risk I don't know enough to make an intelligent request, especially I have never heard of Racket or why Racket libraries would work over Python or Java libraries.
Would love to use Arc on Android, just cause thats what I currently need to do...
To me, a Scala-like JVM compatibility would be great, and being able to call java libraries...
Maybe the libraries aren't really possible without cludging up everything...
