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

Background and history


The andlabs UI project was created to provide a simple-to-use way to create native graphical applications using Go. The API is minimal as it aims to provide only what is necessary to create GUI programs. The core is a C library, which hides the platform-specific APIs, allowing the main library to manage the idiomatic considerations for a Go GUI API. Recently, the C library (libui) was moved to a separate project, which is included in the Go project for developers' convenience.

 

 

There is a demonstration of the widgets available included in the project—when run on a Linux computer, it will look like the following screenshot:

The widget demo from andlabs UI

As a platform-native implementation, the widgets in andlabs UI will look different on each operating system. On Windows and macOS, the library uses the native widget set, and on Linux it uses the GTK+ library. This approach creates applications that are consistent with other software on the current computer and so should...