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 and multi-threading


A GUI must remain responsive to user input at all times. While this is largely an aesthetic consideration, it is also possible that the operating system may monitor applications and force unresponsive user interfaces to quit. Effective event handling is what makes this possible, and this is the core paradigm for a GUI. The event handler is responsible for responding to user events (such as mouse click, finger tap, and keyboard entry), system events (such as file changes, network availability, and application state), and also for updating the user interface (such as rendering content, changing interface state, and more). Anything that stops this work from occurring could cause the application to stop responding. In most graphical toolkits, there is a single thread (a task that manages a set of concurrent operations) that is responsible for the event handling and graphical updates. In some systems, this is the main thread (where an application launches from...