Using Racket Minimal and raco

I use Racket Minimal on my smart phone (this describes how to compile the run time for an ARM based system). It’s is a very small installation of Racket (about 36 MB after installation). After installation one only needs to install the packages that are really neded. But this can be a bit tricky because a lot of packages want to install their documentation and other stuff and bring a whole bunch of files on your drive as dependencies.

Some of the packages are divided up into a "-lib", "-doc" (and sometimes "-test") as laid out in the documentation. With these packages it’s easier to only install the implementation.

A small script of mine used only basic modules and relied on rackunit for the tests. On a mobile device the start up time of such a program can be critical. Therefore it is wise to only require the needed packages and to have the source code being compiled to byte code. One could do this with raco setup (which is included in Minimal Racket) but I wanted to have raco make (which is not part of Minimal Racket) available.

The commands of raco are added via a raco-commands variable in packages’ info.rkt file. I looked through the packages of my “full install” and found the package compiler-lib which adds some commands (make, exe, pack, unpack, decompile, test, expand, read, distribute, demodularize) to raco and relies on only a few other packages. As a result the source and binary files need about 3.8 MB on my phone which is okay for me.

To sum up: After a simple raco pkg install compiler-lib I could easily use raco make and raco test to play with my program on my phone.