While we're still getting the v5.0.2 release out the door, the development repository has moved to v5.0.99.1 (leading up to a v5.1 release in early February).
The Racket GUI and drawing core is completely reimplemented in v5.0.99.1. We've thrown out about 200,000 lines of C++ code that built on Xt, Win32, and Carbon. We've replaced it with about 30,000 lines of Racket code that builds on Gtk, Win32, Cocoa, Cairo, and Pango. On the surface, Windows and Mac OS X users will see only small changes due to the reimplementation. Unix/X users will see more dramatic changes; building on Gtk means that DrRacket and other Racket GUI programs take on your desktop theme for menus, buttons, and other GUI widgets. Through Pango and Cairo, text handling is also better than before on Unix/X, especially when printing. Racket can build and install on Unix systems without Gtk libraries, but you must install Gtk to run programs that use the Racket GUI library; modern distributions of Unix variants include Gtk, so that's unlikely to be a problem. When you build Racket from source on Windows or Mac OS X, Pango and Cairo libraries are automatically downloaded and installed along with the main Racket binaries (i.e., not system-wide). Along similar lines, stand-alone GUI executables for Unix/X platforms rely on a system installation of Gtk, while packaging a stand-alone GUI application for Windows or Mac OS X includes the necessary libraries in the package. The new GUI and drawing library includes several API improvements and a few incompatibilities: * You can run GUI programs with just `racket', instead of having to use `gracket'. Depending on how much your platform distinguishes between GUI and console applications, though, there may still be an advantage to using `gracket' (i.e., to tell the OS that you mean to start a GUI application or that you want a single instance of the application). * Most of the drawing library has moved to `racket/draw', which you can use without the rest of the GUI library --- and, in the case of Unix platforms, without an X-server connection. (The documentation does not yet reflect this split, but that will be fixed soon.) * The drawing library includes some new capabilities, such as rotation, affine transformations, and bitmaps with alpha channels. Xor drawing is no longer supported. See "Porting from v5.0.x to v5.1" in the "Release Notes" section of the documentation for more information. Those notes are also accessible as http://git.racket-lang.org/plt/blob/HEAD:/doc/release-notes/racket/Draw_and_GUI_5_1.txt Some of us have been using the new GUI and drawing implementation as our main version of Racket for everyday work, but it is not yet up to release quality. You will find bugs in v5.0.99.1; please report them, and with your help, we'll get the new libraries in shape by January. _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
