Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By : Andrew Williams
Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

Go is often compared to C++ when it comes to low-level programming and implementations that require faster processing, such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In fact, many claim that Go is superior to C++ in terms of its concurrency and ease of use. Most graphical application toolkits, though, are still written using C or C++, and so they don't enjoy the benefits of using a modern programming language such as Go. This guide to programming GUIs with Go 1.11 explores the various toolkits available, including UI, Walk, Shiny, and Fyne. The book compares the vision behind each project to help you pick the right approach for your project. Each framework is described in detail, outlining how you can build performant applications that users will love. To aid you further in creating applications using these emerging technologies, you'll be able to easily refer to code samples and screenshots featured in the book. In addition to toolkit-specific discussions, you'll cover more complex topics, such as how to structure growing graphical applications, and how cross-platform applications can integrate with each desktop operating system to create a seamless user experience. By delving into techniques and best practices for organizing and scaling Go-based graphical applications, you'll also glimpse Go's impressive concurrency system. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover how to distribute to the main desktop marketplaces and distribution channels. By the end of this book, you'll be a confident GUI developer who can use the Go language to boost the performance of your applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Comparison of GUI Toolkits
Index

Managing platform specifics


Back in Chapter 3Go to the Rescue!, we saw that the Go compiler has built-in support for the conditional inclusion of source files based on a system of environment variables and build tags. As an application adds more functionality, especially from a platform-integration perspective, it is possible that the toolkit you have chosen will not provide all of the functionality you are looking for. When this happens, the code will need to be updated to handle platform-specific functionality. To do so, we will use a variation of the conditional build – using well-named files instead of build tags (as used in Chapter 11, Navigation and Multiple Windows). This is easier to read at the project level and should indicate clearly which files will be compiled for which platform.

Let's create a simple example: we want to show a notification, but our code only has the ability to do so on macOS (darwin). We will set up a simple notify() function that does what we want in the...