Rhombus version 1.0 is now available! - Announcements - Racket Discourse

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Rhombus version 1.0 is now available!

Announcements

rhombus,<br>release

spdegabrielle

June 22, 2026, 2:52pm

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Rhombus v1.0

Rhombus version 1.0 is now available!

Install: Rhombus Download

More information: https://rhombus-lang.org/

Why a new language? Rhombus Goals (copied below)

Frequently Asked Questions: Frequently Asked Questions (copied below)

Example programs: see below

Rhombus major contributors: Mashfi Ishtiaque Ahmad, Taylor Allred, Nia Angle, Wing Hei Chan, Stephen De Gabrielle, Robert Bruce Findler, Jacqueline Firth, Matthew Flatt, Kiran Gopinathan, Ben Greenman, Siddhartha Kasivajhula, Alex Knauth, Jay McCarthy, Lucas Myers, Alec Mills, Sam Phillips, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Jens Axel Søgaard, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt.

Rhombus Goals

Modern programming languages reflect a consensus on the the most important programming concepts, including lexically scoped variables, closures, objects, pattern matching, and type parametricity. Why, then, yet another programming language?

Beyond the basics, there are still more good ideas for programming constructs than can fit in any one language specification. Furthermore, specific domains benefit from language support that is tailored to the domain. Language extensibility helps to balance the competing goals of a manageable language size versus fit-to-purpose for a wide range of tasks.

Many newer languages include a macro system to enable extensibility, but other macro systems have not achieved the expressiveness and fluidity of macros as they exist within the Lisp tradition, which includes Racket. At the same time, that expressiveness has been difficult to detangle from Lisp’s minimalistic, parenthesis-oriented notation.

Rhombus is designed to be

approachable and easy to use for everyday purposes (that do not need macros), which in part means a conventional syntax; and

as extensible as Racket, while making Racket's state-of-the-art facilities more consistent and accessible to a wide audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of programming language is Rhombus?

Rhombus is a general-purpose, functional, extensible programming language with good performance, extensive documentation, and practical libraries. It’s a dynamic language that offers interactivity and flexibility, but it also has the static and abstraction-enforcing constructs that are needed to scale from small scripts to large systems.

Aren’t there a lot of languages like that already?

While there are many small things we think are unique to Rhombus, including compact repetitions using ellipses (...) and a default set of functional data stuctures with good asymptoptic complexity, the big difference is extensibility. See Rhombus Goals.

Is it fast?

Here are some benchmarks.

How do I get started?

See Getting Started.

Do I have to use DrRacket?

The DrRacket programming environment is the easiest way to get started, but see Magic Racket for VSCode or Racket mode (with its racket-hash-lang-mode major mode) for Emacs.

What is the relationship of Rhombus to Racket?

Rhombus is built on Racket, and it relies on many Racket tools, including the DrRacket programming environment and the raco command-line suite. Roughly, the languages are related in the same way as Elixir and Erlang or Kotlin and Java.

Then again, it would be fair to say that Rhombus is just Racket, because Racket is meant to be a multi-language ecosystem, and simply starting a Racket module with #lang rhombus instead of #lang racket makes it a Rhombus module. Rhombus, in turn, is meant to push Racket’s multi-language capabilities forward and enable more languages and dialects that are built on Racket and Rhombus.

Rhombus is simply Racket with a different syntax, right?

A new syntax reflects the main goal of Rhombus, but #lang rhombus also improves on #lang racket in other ways: better predefined data structures (especially lists), a new class system, pervasive pattern matching, extensible static information as a new point on the spectrum of contracts to types, hierarchical namespace organization, and more.

These general language improvements could have been implemented for a Racket dialect that’s based on S-expressions, but language–syntax codesign for Rhombus opened more possibilities and produced a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts.

Rhombus is Racket without S-expressions, so the syntax is not homoiconic, right?

Hello, fellow Lisper! Rhombus has a bicameral syntax, where the analog to the S-expression layer is shrubbery notation. This is an important part of Rhombus’s approach to macros and...