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

Chapter 9. nk - Nuklear for Go

Nuklear is a lightweight widget library that focuses purely on the graphical interface. It provides a rich widget toolkit that renders identically across all supported platforms. Originally designed for embedded systems, it avoids the complications of application life cycles and windows and managing user interaction to keep its API focused and completely platform-independent. Its implementation has no dependencies and achieves this by avoiding a platform-specific render library or operating system drivers.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • The design and purpose of the Nuklear project
  • Getting set up with Nuklear and the Go bindings, nk
  • How to create a render context and use the toolkit widgets
  • Building a complete application using nk

By the end of this chapter, you'll have created an nk-based application using an OpenGL backend that will work across all mainstream desktop operating systems.