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 nk


To use GLFW and Go-GL, we'll need to link to some C APIs; however, these aren't (on most systems) external libraries. The fact that the only native dependency is the OpenGL native library (which is typically part of the operating system), and any intermediate libraries are embedded within the Go projects, means that all we need to prepare is CGo.

Prerequisites

As the renderer we'll use for nk requires access to native C APIs, we'll need CGo to be correctly functioning for our applications to build. On most platforms, this simply means installing a compatible C compiler. This is only a development dependency and there's no installation required for the users of applications that we build with nk (other than an OpenGL compatible system). If you've worked through previous chapters of this book, then you probably have this set up already. If not, or you're unsure, then follow the steps in the Appendix, Installation Details, in the Setting up CGo section.

Some platforms will...