An Implementation of Python for Racket

Racket is a descendent of Scheme that is widely used as a first language for teaching computer science. To this end, Racket provides DrRacket, a simple but pedagogic IDE. On the other hand, Python is becoming increasingly popular in a variety of areas, most notably among novice programmers. This paper presents an implementation of Python for Racket which allows programmers to use DrRacket with Python code, as well as adding Python support for other DrRacket based tools. Our implementation also allows Racket programs to take advantage of Python libraries, thus significantly enlarging the number of usable libraries in Racket. Our proposed solution involves compiling Python code into semantically equivalent Racket source code. For the runtime implementation, we present two different strategies: (1) using a foreign function interface to directly access the Python virtual machine, therefore borrowing its data types and primitives or (2) implementing all of Python’s data model purely over Racket data types. The first strategy provides immediate support for Python’s standard library and existing third-party libraries. The second strategy requires a Racket-based reimplementation of all of Python’s features, but provides native interoperability between Python and Racket code. Our experimental results show that the second strategy far outmatches the first in terms of speed. Furthermore, it is more portable since it has no dependencies on Python’s virtual machine.