[racket-dev] update on reimplementing GRacket

At Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:43:09 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> First, do the difficulties you've had integrating eventspaces with
> modern toolkits suggest that perhaps eventspaces should be designed
> differently?

Not as far as I can tell. The fundamental problem is being able to use
some GUI elements (e.g., DrRacket's GUI) while a callback associated
with another set of GUI elements might be blocked. GUI toolkits like
Cocoa and Gtk2 don't support that in any simple way that I see.

> Second, how much will the distinction between gracket and racket exist
> once gracket2 is implemented? 

On platforms with a distinction between GUI and console applications
(Windows and to a lesser extent Mac OS X), there's still a role for a
GUI-mode executable in addition to a console-mode executable. Starting
`racket' will not prevent you from using `racket/gui/base', though.

> Will there still be a concept of a "gui
> namespace", for example?

There must be only one instance of `racket/gui/base' in a Racket
process, because various global hooks must be set for GUI toolkit and
the Racket run-time system. So, it will still be important to attach
`racket/gui/base' to another namespace where you want to use it.

> Third, to what degree will the underlying toolkit be exposed in a
> gracket-compatible way?  For example, will it be possible to use
> gtk-specific methods to implement custom dialogs on X?

I don't know. At best, directly using the underlying toolkit would be
unsafe with respect to eventspaces, but maybe that won't be much
different than the unsafety of using the FFI.