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

Concurrency, threads, and GUI updates


Goroutines are a very powerful tool for running concurrent operations and background tasks, especially if they're short-running. As we move more application logic and data handling to background processes, we need to add appropriate safeguards to ensure that errors are handled and that the user interface is kept up to date.

Managing long-running processes

A goroutine is typically created so that code flow continues while another task completes in the background. If these tasks start to be used for application-critical tasks or to handle important data, especially if these tasks could take a long time, we need to manage them more carefully. The main consideration is how to shut down background tasks gracefully if the application exits. This may not seem essential, and for some tasks it may not be, but if the process is involved in data integrity, we want to be certain that early termination doesn't cause problems.

Signaling shutdown

To demonstrate the problem...