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

Getting started with Fyne


Before we start building a Fyne application, we will step through the installation and run an example application. For most systems, the setup is as simple as installing the fyne.io/fyne package using standard Go tools. For some systems, however, there are development prerequisites to check, so let's start there.

Prerequisites

For the majority of platforms, there are no installation requirements to begin using Fyne. On macOS and Windows, the toolkit uses built-in OpenGL capabilities, so you can skip straight to the following Setup section (however, if you are developing for the first time on macOS, examine the following notes). If you are working with Linux (or another Unix system), then it may be necessary to install a number of system header files.

Linux

To compile on Linux, you will need to have the Xorg and GL (mesa or similar) headers installed (this is not required for running the applications). The specifics will vary from system to system, but the most common...