exceptionally dumb question, but is there a better way to save a pict to a file than (send (pict->bitmap plt) save-file "/home/hazel/bar.png" 'png)

Not really. But there is a save-pict in MetaPict for convenience. https://docs.racket-lang.org/metapict/index.html?q=metapict#%28def._%28%28lib._metapict%2Fpict..rkt%29._save-pict%29%29

Does pict support prop:convertible? I guess it wouldn’t save that much process.

As far as I remember, yes.

Does Racket provide any functions to get an idea of available memory?

I’m adding UCI support to my chess engine, and the size of the transposition hash table is configurable. The engine may be run on various systems with differing RAM amounts, so I’d like to choose something reasonable for my upper limit.

For those wondering… UCI = Universal Chess Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Chess_Interface

No, nothing in particular. I think that’s a tricky question even if you use raw OS interfaces, because the right answer involves a combination of process limits, virtual memory, actual memory, and what else is running. (We tried to make something like that work in the early days of custodian-require-memory, and we gave up.)

Thanks. I figured it would be pretty inexact. Fortunately, for the scenario that really matters (automated rating tests of engines), I think they set the hash table limits fairly low. I would only need to know the upper limit for a scenario where a human was configuring the engine for best play.

On another note (and forgive me if I’ve already proposed this), I like how the Julia Slack uses “helpdesk” for a similar channel to our #beginners channel. The understanding is it’s the place for Q & A vs. other types of discussions, so a superset of “beginners”. Having been coding Racket full time for a couple years now, I’m probably not technically a “beginner”, but I have lots of questions! :)

Yeah - I have been wondering about macro question in this channel :slightly_smiling_face:. I usually ask in #general instead.

I suppose #beginners could be overwhelmed by advanced questions, so maybe an additional channel, add #helpdesk for general Q&A, and leave #beginners for on-boarding, and genuinely “beginner” questions.

I suppose - but since the traffic is low, I don’t know whether it actually is a problem?

Possibly not a problem, and I may be overthinking, as is typical :) After all, the racket-users mailing list is just one bucket.

using pollen and butterick argued he had to escape the @ sign a lot? curious what the @ sign in racket is used for that it needs to be escaped so often

Emails and unquote-splicing comes to mind. I prefer to use @ over the lozenge though.

yeah, i changed it back to @ for now

@"@" is pretty straightforward to use, if an actual @ is needed.

what is the technical reason that pollen cant publish the final output in the same directory as the source?

ahh, i remember what i did now to work around it:

public src //where all the pollen markup files are you can’t publish inside the same folder where all the pollen markup files are, but you can publish a directory up