An Implementation of Python for DrRacket

The Python programming language is becoming increasingly popular in a variety of areas, most notably among novice programmers. This paper presents an implementation of Python for DrRacket which allows Python programmers to use DrRacket’s features with Python code, as well as adding Python support for DrRacket based tools, such as Rosetta. The suggested approach involves compiling Python code into equivalent Racket code. The compiled code makes use of a runtime library that runs on top of Python’s virtual machine, therefore using its data types and primitive operations. This approach allows full support for Python’s libraries, but intermediate results have evidenced issues with garbage collection and a slowdown by at least one order of magnitude when compared to Python’s reference implementation. Future efforts include reducing the dependency on Python’s virtual machine by implementing most of its primitives over Racket data types.