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

Cross-platform for any application


In the introduction, we saw that a file with a name ending in _test.go would automatically be run as part of the test phase. Go uses this naming convention for additional compiler features to provide the ability to include code for a specific platform or computer architecture. For example, a file named main_windows.go will only be included in the compilation if you are building for Microsoft Windows, and the main_darwin.go file would only be compiled for macOS (darwin is the name of the underlying operating system). Similarly, the computer architecture can be used to conditionally include source code, and so a file named main_arm.go would only be part of the build for a 32-bit ARM-based processor.

Go also supports the conditional compilation of arbitrary files through the use of build constraints (also known as build tags). These operate at a file level to determine whether a file should be included in the build. To use this functionality, a comment is placed...