Can Racket produce visually stunning apps on par with commercial software?

Question

Although Racket permits one to create GUI apps (even games) I am wondering whether it is suitable for releasing commercial applications visually on par with Things or OmniOutliner. Would such an app feel native or would it look like an awkward stepchild not belonging on the platform? For example the Gnome apps on Ubuntu blend seamlessly into the platform even though some are written in Ruby or Python.

Can Racket pull this off and if so can someone point me to an example? I'm trying to determine how suitable Racket is for creating -- from a visual perspective -- commercial-quality applications. Without this one could not readily use it to make apps for sale and this seems to reduce the language to backend and academic use.

Answer 1

The Racket GUI is written to produce programs that run on Windows, OS X and Linux without changing a single line in the code.

Examining Things and OmniOutliner I see that the applications are OS X only. This imply that they use OS X specific GUI elements - the conclusion must therefore be, that you can't produce just as polished interfaces if you stick to racket/gui.

However there is a silver lining. Racket includes an Object C FFI, so you can use the OS X specific GUI elements directly. Since you are interested in writing an OS X only application (I presume), you have more leeway than an OS agnostic GUI library.

As an example of embedding OS X specific GUI elements into a Racket program, I'll point you towards this project which embeds WebKit into Racket: https://github.com/shekari/racket-webkit

Answer 2

The best example I'm aware of is the Dr. Racket IDE you got with Racket. It runs on multiple platforms. It includes full source code.