RacketCon Returns to Oakland for 16th Edition in October 2026

The Racket programming language community has released full details for the sixteenth RacketCon, its annual gathering of developers, educators, and researchers, set for October 3-4, 2026, at Oakstop's Broadway Gallery Suite in Oakland, California.

After an initial listing on the Racket website gave only a bare-bones notice that the conference would be held "on Saturday" without further specifics, organizers have now published a complete schedule, speaker lineup, and registration information, resolving earlier uncertainty about the event's format and logistics.

Registration is open now, with discounted early-bird pricing available through September 13. As in past years, the conference will be livestreamed for those who cannot attend in person, with a live chat running alongside the stream and recordings posted to YouTube afterward. Remote viewers will have the option to buy a participation ticket to support the broadcast.

The conference opens Saturday at 9 a.m. with a keynote from Pat Hanrahan, the Canon Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University, who led the design of Pixar's RenderMan, co-founded Tableau, and received the 2019 ACM Turing Award. His talk, "On Notation," sets the tone for a day of technical sessions covering type systems, low-level programming, and developer tooling.

Saturday's program includes Fred Fu of Indiana University on combining occurrence typing with algebraic subtyping for Typed Racket; Lucas Myers of Northwestern University introducing Pille, a new Rhombus-based language aimed at low-level and high-performance programming on constrained platforms like microcontrollers; Mike Delmonaco of Amazon Web Services presenting Treason, a prototype macro-extensible language designed to keep IDE services working even when code is broken; Pavel Panchekha of the University of Utah marking ten years of Herbie, a compiler that improves floating-point accuracy; a talk from a Vancouver-based linguist and hobbyist programmer known as JJ on effect handlers in the cio library; and Racket developer Ryan Culpepper presenting BrandX, a new library for object-oriented programming via interfaces and generics. The day closes with an evening social at Drake's Dealership on Broadway.

Sunday continues with Sam Phillips introducing Uke, an immutable dataframe library for Racket, followed by Racket core developer and University of Utah professor Matthew Flatt discussing ffi2, a new foreign-function interface layer that combines ideas from Racket's original FFI and Chez Scheme's ftypes system. The conference closes with Sam Tobin-Hochstadt's annual "State of Racket" address and a town hall session with Racket's management team, where attendees are invited to raise questions and discussion topics.

RacketCon has long served as the central meeting point for the Racket community, bringing together language designers, library authors, and users to share research and practical tools built with the language. This year's agenda reflects that mix, spanning type theory, compiler internals, systems programming, and data tooling.