C vs. Racket vs. SQL vs. ZenScript 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.

ZenScript originated from MineTweaker where a simple programming language is needed to allow users without programming knowledge to be able to execute simple commands by following the tutorials for it. Originally MineTweaker had a simple one-line-at-a-time parsed scripting system, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't flexible enough, so a simple parsed language was created. This parsed language worked quite well but was very inefficient as each value was wrapped into its own object. ZenScript allows mixed typed and typeless behavior. You don't need to define types anywhere, the compile will infer them where possible and exhibit typeless behavior when the type is effectively unknown. In nearly all the cases, the type is perfectly known and execution runs at native Java speed. Since there are types, they can be documented and enforced.