RacketCon is back, and it’s shaping up to be one of the more technical gatherings in the functional programming calendar. The conference runs Saturday, October 3rd, with sessions starting at 8:30AM PDT and doors opening at 9:00AM PDT. Registration is open now, with discounted early bird tickets available before September 13th.
The day opens with Pat Hanrahan, the Canon Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University, who led the design of RenderMan at Pixar and co-founded Tableau. He received the 2019 ACM Turing Award. His talk, titled “On Notation,” sets the tone for a day focused on the language itself.
Fred Fu’s Type Inference Talk
Fred Fu, a PhD candidate at Indiana University, follows with “Type Inference With Logical Types For Untyped Languages.” Fu’s work on Typed Racket — the gradually typed counterpart to Racket — has been fixing bugs and refining the metatheory of occurrence typing, one of the language’s distinguishing features.
The talk addresses a specific pain point: when a Typed Racket program imports a macro from an untyped Racket module, the type system often rejects the code. Fu’s prototype combines occurrence typing with algebraic subtyping to infer types for generated parameters, a problem that currently forces programmers to rewrite macros.
Lucas Myers Introduces Pille
Lucas Myers, a PhD student at Northwestern University advised by Robby Findler, takes the stage at 11:10AM with “Language-Oriented Low-Level Programming With Pille.” Myers worked in the software industry before his PhD, spanning the hardware/software stack.
Pille is a new Rhombus-based language built on an LLVM-based compiler. It grafts Rhombus’s enforestation process onto a fresh core language, bypassing the Racket VM’s limitations while keeping full Rhombus-based macros. The talk emphasizes how its high-level metaprogramming can solve decidedly low-level problems.
Mike Delmonaco On Treason
Mike Delmonaco, a Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services with a hobby interest in Programming Languages and Racket, presents “Treason: Making Macros And IDE Services Work Together” at 1:30PM. Racket’s macros are powerful but get in the way of IDE services when a program is broken or incomplete.
Treason is a prototype that lets macro expansion recover from errors and continue collecting information for IDE services. Syntax-class annotations allow subexpression expansion even within a broken macro use, a key contribution the talk demonstrates.
Herbie: Improving Floating-Point Accuracy
Pavel Panchekha, an Associate Professor at the University of Utah and a Herbie developer, closes the main session at 2:10PM with “Herbie: Improving Floating-Point Accuracy.” Floating-point math requires rounding, and two ways of writing the same formula can produce radically different results.
Herbie is a compiler that compiles mathematical formulas to accurate floating-point expressions. The talk introduces floating-point error, demonstrates Herbie, and reflects on ten years of writing it in Racket.
Schedule At A Glance
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 8:30AM PDT | Doors Open |
| 9:00AM PDT | Registration |
| 10:00AM PDT | Pat Hanrahan – On Notation |
| 10:30AM PDT | Break |
| 11:10AM PDT | Fred Fu – Type Inference With Logical Types For Untyped Languages |
| 11:50AM PDT | Lucas Myers – Language-Oriented Low-Level Programming With Pille |
| 1:30PM PDT | Lunch |
| 2:10PM PDT | Mike Delmonaco – Treason: Making Macros And IDE Services Work Together |
| 2:50PM PDT | Break |
| 3:30PM PDT | Pavel Panchekha – Herbie: Improving Floating-Point Accuracy |
Key Facts Box
- Early bird deadline: September 13th
- Conference date: Saturday, October 3rd
- Start time: 8:30AM PDT
- First talk: Pat Hanrahan, 10:00AM PDT
- Lunch: 1:30PM PDT
- Last talk: Pavel Panchekha, 3:30PM PDT
What We Make Of It
The schedule is packed, and it leans heavily on recent research. Hanrahan’s Turing Award-winning pedigree anchors the day, but the real draw is the work-in-progress nature of the later talks. Fu’s prototype type inference, Myers’s Pille, Delmonaco’s Treason, and Panchekha’s decade of Herbie all represent live threads of research rather than finished products.
That makes for a conference that feels less like a marketing push and more like a working meeting. The stream and recording availability mean the content lives beyond the room, which is a smart move for a language that wants to reach the wider programming world.
For anyone building with Racket or curious about typed languages, this is the kind of day that rewards a morning off. The talks are dense, the speakers are accomplished, and the subject matter cuts across notation, type systems, low-level performance, and numerical accuracy — a wide net for a single day.
Source material: “RacketCon Is Saturday,” racket-lang.org.
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