in praise of PostgreSQL arrays

I just added support for PostgreSQL arrays to the db library. While there are some uses of arrays that are iffy from a database design standpoint, there’s one use that weighs overwhelmingly in their favor: avoiding dynamic generation of SQL IN comparisons.

the Soylent Green Theory of Presentations

It’s people.... The audience is made of people!

lazy module loading

The Racket module system is good at managing dependencies. When you require a module, you ensure that that module is initialized before your code runs, and when the other module changes, the compiler will notice and recompile your module too. Racket even stratifies dependencies according to phase levels so you can use some modules in your macro implementations and other modules in your run-time code and the expander/compiler/linker knows what you want when. It keeps track and makes sure that everything is loaded and available when it’s supposed to be.

But sometimes you want to manage dependencies yourself. This post is about how to lazily load the implementations of functions and—with a bit of care—even macros.