Announcing wxWidgets 3.2.0 release candidate

[Vadim Zeitlin]

June 27, 2022 -- The wxWidgets team is pleased to announce the first
release candidate of the version 3.2.0 of our open source framework for
the development of native cross-platform applications in C++.

wxWidgets 3.2.0 will be the first release in the new 3.2.x series and its
release candidate version is available now from

https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/releases/v3.2.0-rc1

Compared to the stable 3.0.x series, this version brings too many
improvements and even more bug fixes to list all of them here, please
see the change log

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/v3.2.0-rc1/docs/changes.txt

for the incomplete list of the most important ones and here is the
maximally condensed summary of the changes compared to 3.0:

- Build system improvements: support for new compilers (up to MSVS 2022,
g++ 12, clang 14) with an even simpler way of using wxWidgets from
MSVS, with wxwidgets.props file, and OS versions as well as an
entirely new CMake build system.
- Support for native dark mode under macOS 10.14 and later, support for
ARM hardware and macOS versions up to 13.
- High DPI support with the new, but almost perfectly backwards-
compatible, API based on wxBitmapBundle, including per-monitor DPI and
dynamic DPI changes.
- New features: HTTPS and HTTP/2 support with wxWebRequest and friends;
support for freezing rows/columns in wxGrid; mouse gesture events
(GSoC 2017 project); non-integer font sizes and arbitrary font weights
in wxFont; fractional pen widths in wxGraphicsContext; arbitrary label
windows in wxStaticBox; markup in wxDataViewCtrl items text; support
for ZIP 64 files; LZMA compression; much improved accessibility
support under MSW; new Edge-based wxWebView implementation.
- New classes: wxActivityIndicator, wxAddRemoveCtrl, wxAppProgressIndicator,
wxBitmapBundle, wxNativeWindow, wxPersistentComboBox,
wxPowerResourceBlocker, wxSecretStore, wxTempFFile and many new
features in the existing classes.
- New XRC handlers for all the new and some of the existing classes.
- Significant improvements to: wxBusyInfo, wxDataViewCtrl, wxDirDialog, wxGrid,
wxNotificationMessage, wxSpinCtrl, wxStaticBox, wxStyledTextCtrl,
wxUIActionSimulator.
- Improvements to compile-time safety with the possibility to disable dangerous
implicit conversions between wxString and "char*" strings.
- Latest versions of all bundled 3rd party libraries, including all the
security fixes and support for WebKit 2 and GStreamer 1.7 under Unix.
- Revamped OpenGL support better suited to modern OpenGL (3.2+).
- Further C++11 and later support improvements, wxWidgets can be built using
C++20 compilers.
- New experimental wxQt port.
- Many, many bug fixes.


This release is the start of a new "stable" release series, meaning that
it provides an ABI stability guarantee and that applications using it
will keep working even without recompiling with any of the subsequent
3.2.x releases.

In spite of a huge number of changes, this release remains almost fully
API-compatible with the previous 3.0.x releases and 3.1.7 and updating
the existing applications to use it should be straightforward.

We hope that you will enjoy using the new release!

Vadim Zeitlin, on behalf of wxWidgets development team.