Racket 9.3 ships Markdown docs, faster DrRacket checks, and finer package controls

The Racket team has released version 9.3 of the language-oriented programming language, a maintenance-and-tooling update that sharpens the developer workflow rather than reshaping the language. The headline conveniences: raco setup can now emit Markdown documentation via --doc-markdown, and raco pkg install gains several knobs — --adjacent-deps, --destdir, --attach, and a smarter --skip-installed — for controlling how packages land at install time. DrRacket also feels snappier, since its background expansion now skips errortrace annotations to speed up syntax checking.

Under the hood, the release trims what racket/base pulls in, reducing internal module requires and instantiations for faster startup, and the file/zip package gains much finer control over archive generation, including in-memory file sources and per-file compression settings. Networking code benefits from tcp-listen automatically retrying on an ‘address in use’ error, and FFI users get a define-runtime-lib mechanism to locate shared libraries relative to a source file. Several continuation and contract internals were refined, including changes to impersonate-prompt-tag and prompt-tag/c, plus a new error-syntax->srcloc-handler parameter for controlling error source mapping.

For educators, the ‘#lang’-based teaching languages (BSL through ISL+, plus DeinProgram) have reached feature parity with the dialects selected through the Language dialog and are now the recommended path. As a community-driven open-source project, the release credits roughly 30 contributors, and the maintainers are asking users to help spread the word and update platform package repositories.