Racket v8.18

posted by Stephen De Gabrielle

We are pleased to announce Racket v8.18 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/.

As of this release:

• The racket-lang.org website no longer distributes Racket BC bundles, but it includes pre-built bundles for two flavors of ARM linux, AArch64 and 32-bit ARMv6 VFP.
• XML structures are serializable.
• Scribble’s HTML generation conforms better to modern standards.
• Racket uses Unicode 16.0 for character and string operations.
• The redex-check default generation strategy always uses random generation to supplement the enumerator.
• DrRacket supports the use of shift-tab to go backward to previous indentation positions.
• The macro stepper supports the string-constants library, allowing internationalization of the stepper itself.
• The struct form supports #:properties prop-list-expr, making it more convenient to attach multiple property values to a structure type.
• Build-system improvements support containers registered at Docker Hub to build for all platforms that have downloads from the main Racket download site; improvements also support Unix-style builds for Mac OS in the style of MacPorts.
• The expt function produces a more accurate result when its first argument is a flonum and its second argument is an exact integer that has no equivalent flonum representation than it did in prior versions.
• TCP ports use SO_KEEPALIVE correctly.
• Unsafe code can use “uninterruptible mode” instead of “atomic mode” to allow futures to run concurrently while preventing interruptions from other threads.
• The net/imap library supports IMAP’s move operation.
• There are many other repairs and documentation improvements!

Thank you

The following people contributed to this release:

Bob Burger, Bogdan Popa, Brad Lucier, Carl Gay, Chloé Vulquin, D. Ben Knoble, Gustavo Massaccesi, Jacqueline Firth, Jade Sailor, Jarhmander, Jason Hemann, Jens Axel Søgaard, Joel Dueck, John Clements, jyn, Jörgen Brandt, Mao Yifu, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber, Noah Ma, paralogismos, Pavel Panchekha, Philip McGrath, Robby Findler, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shalok Shalom, Stephen De Gabrielle, Steve Byan, Vincent Lee, Wing Hei Chan, and ZC Findler.

Racket is a community developed open source project and we welcome new contributors. See racket/README.md to learn how you can be a part of this amazing project.

Feedback Welcome

Questions and discussion welcome at the Racket community on Discourse or Discord.

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If you can - please help get the word out to users and platform specific repo packagers

Racket - the Language-Oriented Programming Language - version 8.18 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org

See https://blog.racket-lang.org/2025/08/racket-v8-18.html for the release announcement and highlights.