display doesnt work?

[stchang]

display doesnt seem to print unless a newline is subsequently printed after it (displayln works fine)

Example

#lang racket/base
(display 333) ; prints nothing

#lang racket/base
(displayln 333) ; prints 333

#lang racket/base
(display 333) 
(newline) ; prints 333

#lang racket/base
(display 333) 
(displayln 1) ; prints 3331

Maybe a buffer needs explicit flushing somewhere?

[gamburgm]

The buffer that needs 'explicit flushing' is NewlineFlushingOutputPort in runtime/core/ports.js.

Thought about this a little bit and the solutions that come to mind are non-trivial. node offers process callbacks, so server-side you could write

process.on('exit', () => flushCurrentOutputPort())

But process isn't available in the browser. We could write a 'cleanup' function that flushes all output ports and registers/deregisters ports as current-output-port is modified or other ports are constructed, but that adds some overhead to all programs. Other option is to stop buffering altogether, but not sure if that's desired behavior.

[stchang]

Thanks for thinking about this! I thought it would be an easy fix but then I looked into it for a while and couldnt figure it out.

I think the argument has to be a buffer so that in the future we could possibly support the entire port api if we wanted