Apache Groovy vs. Racket vs. Rust vs. Scheme Comparison Chart

Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language that serves as a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme. It is designed as a platform for programming language design and implementation, enabling developers to create new domain-specific and general-purpose languages. Racket's core language includes features such as macros, modules, lexical closures, tail calls, delimited continuations, parameters (fluid variables), software contracts, green threads, and OS threads. The language also comes with primitives, such as event spaces and custodians, which control resource management and enable the language to act like an operating system for loading and managing other programs. Further extensions to the language are created with the powerful macro system, which, together with the module system and custom parsers, can control all aspects of a language. Most language constructs in Racket are implemented as macros in the base language.

Scheme is a general-purpose computer programming language. It is a high-level language, supporting operations on structured data such as strings, lists, and vectors, as well as operations on more traditional data such as numbers and characters. While Scheme is often identified with symbolic applications, its rich set of data types and flexible control structures make it a truly versatile language. Scheme has been employed to write text editors, optimize compilers, operating systems, graphics packages, expert systems, numerical applications, financial analysis packages, virtual reality systems, and practically every other type of application imaginable. Scheme is a fairly simple language to learn since it is based on a handful of syntactic forms and semantic concepts and since the interactive nature of most implementations encourages experimentation. Scheme is a challenging language to understand fully.