Polar coding are the first class of provable capacity-achieving coding techniques for a wide range of channels. With an ideal recursive structure and many elegant mathematical properties, polar codes are inherently implemented with low complexity encoding and decoding algorithms. Since the block length of the original polar construction is limited to powers of two, rate-compatible polar codes (RCPC) are presented to meet the flexible length/rate transmission requirements in practice. The RCPC codes are well-conditioned to combine with the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) system, providing high throughput efficiency and such RCPC-HAPQ scheme is commonly used in delay-insensitive communication system. This paper first gives a survey of both the classical and state-of-the-art encoding/decoding algorithms for polar codes. Then the RCPC construction methods are discussed, including the puncturing, shortening, multi-kernel construction, etc. Finally, we investigate several RCPC-HARQ jointly design systems and discuss their encoding gain and re-transmission diversity gain.