Rhombus 1.1 is now available

sspdegabrielle about 3 hours ago 12 commentsRead Article on blog.racket-lang.org

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Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

Racket was always one of my favorite Lisp / Scheme dialect, mainly because of its very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort, that and Dr Racket lets you see visually where import goes into code, and a bunch of other nice things.

Rhombus strikes to me as an interesting language in this ecosystem (which it is!) that not only gives you access to all those capabilities, but shows how powerful Racket can be for building programming languages!

That said I have not yet sat down to try it, but as they seem to be doing quick development with it, I just might have to.

The entire Rhombus repo is all Racket:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aracket%2Frhombus++languag...

piloto_ciego•about 1 hour ago

I really want to like Racket? I really do, but I just never really enjoyed like I liked Python. And despite trying a bunch of other Lisps and liking them, something about Dr. Racket annoyed me. I'm not sure why.

It's "cool" and the ecosystem rules, and it's fast enough, I just never really found that I liked writing Racket or using Dr. Racket the same way I like writing Python so I never really reached for it when I was trying to do something. Indeed, from the first time I looked at Python I liked it. That was not the case with Javascript or Java or C or PHP? I don't know, I like Python and really want a practical Lisp that I can really sink my teeth into? So by all accounts I should love Racket. And yet, I don't.

That said, Rhombus looks really nice at first glance. This might be worth a sustained excursion to build something a bit more fun... I'm kind of excited about this!

giraffe_lady•28 minutes ago

Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much and not able to put my finger on why. It's not even top 10 languages or top 5 lisps for me but it is just incredibly practical. I have zero passion for this language.

The way I use racket its main competitor is python. It's for when I want to accomplish something with heavy third party deps, and I have zero interest in writing the actual cool code I just need to make some libraries kiss and then use my tool. Not saying that's the case here but maybe racket just doesn't offer you much that python doesn't?

Sounds like you'd get more from just using one of the other lisps you liked, especially if there's a more specialized one that wouldn't be competing with a language you probably would prefer to use anyway. Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel.

piloto_ciego•14 minutes ago

This is something to think about... and you know, the other side of it is, "maybe I should play with Rhombus but also just spend some time playing more in Racket and choose to like it more?" lol - we can do that right? Choose to enjoy things?

One of the things I've really wanted to get into is writing some DSLs and Racket and Rhombus are supposed to be the tools you're supposed to reach for for that?

I don't know, the god's honest truth is that I don't write nearly as much code as I did 8 months ago lol, so maybe just diving into Racket and Rhombus for personal stuff would be fun and it doesn't have to something for work...

Really, the lisps I've really liked are Guile Scheme (ok not a lisp really but lispy enough and I liked it) and Clojure? But though I liked them I never had enough work in them to get really good. I do like Lispy languages in general though (since Emacs Lisp, which is glorious in it's own way), I just need the excuse to start playing with them more because they're fun.

You know what I've been really intrigued with over the years has been uLisp (which should be pronounced Micro Lisp) for microcontrollers (http://www.ulisp.com/), but a really cool project would be a DSL that spits out C for the STM32 boards I play with periodically for embedded stuff? I don't know, maybe after I get the cabin done... that'd be a really fun adventure and writing a DSL for that would make my life immensely easier...

spdegabrielle•about 3 hours ago

We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org

Rhombus is easy to use and uniquely customizable.

See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html for the release announcement and highlights.

JoelMcCracken•about 2 hours ago

I experimented with Rhombus some time ago (most especially with Shplait). Is there much new with Shplait? Something I remember struggling with was trying to use racket libraries in Rhombus/Shplait

threatofrain•about 3 hours ago

The way the Rhombus / Racket community does libraries has to change. That whole package site has to change. Being a contributor on there exposes you to a steady stream of fraud garbage. There's nothing to promote the top libraries as the top libraries.

https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/?fam=Rhombus

behnamoh•about 2 hours ago

I wish they had chosen a more "modern" name for the language.

Jtsummers•about 2 hours ago

What would be a modern name for a language?

jambutters•about 2 hours ago

Honestly a unique searchable name is better. I type in racket and results are mixed with tennis and I need to suffix "Language"

peesem•about 2 hours ago

well, i also have to type "rhombus language" to get relevant results for the rhombus language

jimbob45•about 2 hours ago

.NET/.NET Core/.NET Framework migration is painful because of this. VS/VSCode is sometimes only possible with AI’s help.