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

Object model and event handling


The Qt framework is written using the C++ language, and so much of its architecture will be familiar to those who've coded in C++ before. It's important to note that Go isn't a complete object-oriented language and, as such, doesn't match these capabilities directly. In particular, we should look at inheritance as it's important to the Qt object model.

Inheritance

The Qt API is a fully object-oriented model that makes heavy use of the inheritance model. While Go doesn't truly support object-oriented inheritance in the traditional manner, its composition approach is very powerful and works well in its place. The result means that you probably won't notice the difference! This only comes into play if you wish to implement a custom widget, which is out of scope for this chapter.

Memory management

As you'll have noticed in the preceding example, each widget expects the parent to be passed to the constructing function. This enables the Qt framework to handle the tidying...