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 in language design


In most mainstream programming languages, concurrency and multithreading can add complexity and make code harder to read. The designers of Go decided that concurrency should be built in from the beginning, making it easy to manage many threads of execution while still avoiding the difficulty of shared memory management. Go does not expose traditional threads, but instead introduces the concept of goroutines—these are akin to lightweight threads, but it's possible to have several thousand at the same time. Shared memory is normally the main communication mechanism for concurrent applications, but in Go communication is used to share instead—this built-in feature is called channels. In addition to these language features, Go has a sync package within the standard library that provides tools for further concurrency management.

 

 

Goroutines

First, let's examine the most basic Go concurrency feature: the goroutine. Any normal function, when called, will execute the...