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 design of Nuklear


Nuklear was designed to build graphical user interfaces for embedded applications and games. It aims to be lightweight and completely platform agnostic. It manages this by leaving the window management, operating system-specific methods, and even the render driver to separate modules or the applications that use the library. Many of these features are provided by add-on modules; due to Nuklear's popularity, there are many render drivers to choose from (some are operating system-specific and others work across multiple platforms). Nuklear has been made available within the public domain, which also makes it an attractive option for embedding within commercial software.

 

Nuklear provides many widgets, layouts, and features for creating rich application GUIs that can also be skinned to suit the application design. The following screenshot is an example of the standard interface design: more can be found in the gallery section of the project website at https:...