# Racket 102 Hacker News commenters recommended Racket and 31 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 6 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A Scheme-based language praised for making DSLs easy, with a large standard library, built-in cross-platform GUI toolkit and fast runtime, though database and third-party library support lags. ## Why people recommend it - Easy DSLs and language building (6 comments): "Racket makes it easy to build little DSLs, but they all play perfectly together because the underlying data model is the same." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903229)) "the fact that its even possible to make a Pythonic language on top of a LISP is its own showcase for Racket's power" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660454)) "Being able to redefine any part of the stack for any reason is a superpower you don't know you need until you do." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343168)) - Rich standard library and ecosystem (4 comments): "Racket is great! The runtime is reasonably fast, and the standard library is exceptionally featureful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307696)) "Racket, a Scheme with a much larger standard library and many great user-contributed libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953419)) "very rich ecosystem, you can make websites, GUIs a lot of things with very minimal effort" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325954)) - Cross-platform GUIs and executables (4 comments): "Not only do I produce standalone executables in Racket, I cross-compile GUI apps written on MacOS to produce executables for Windows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405939)) "Because it builds on the Racket platform you get one of the only cross-platform uniform gui toolkits that works out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338773)) "I wrote the code in Racket and I sent the ".exe" file to my coworkers, that never knew they were using Racket." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402485)) - Fast runtime (3 comments): "Racket absolutely crushes Python in terms of speed and goes speedily enough against other popular performance-focused languages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031090)) "Racket is great! The runtime is reasonably fast, and the standard library is exceptionally featureful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307696)) "Racket is significantly faster than many other Scheme implementations, including Chicken" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256443)) ## What people warn about - Weak database and third-party libraries (2 comments): "Racket, I didn't continue just because the library ecosystem isn't mature enough to keep up with the latest in databases and other 3rd party services." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523799)) "I enjoyed the hell out of programming in Racket. Up until the point I needed to access a database." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46236287)) - No incremental live environment (2 comments): "one thing that CL does that Racket doesn't do (afaik) is when you change a data type (e.g. alter a struct), it automatically ensures live code uses the new types" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157446)) "The biggest downside of Racket is that you can't build up your environment incrementally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154975)) - Reader quirks and annoyances (2 comments): "I'm torn on whether this feels like the Reader is bloated/polluted or whether this is the coolest numerical parser I've ever used." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49403584)) "That read-syntax doesn't just accept everything accepted by plain read is one of my biggest annoyances with Racket." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405922)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Racket", https://hackerapproved.com/p/racket/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).