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

Walk in a cross-platform application


Walk is clearly a library aimed at creating graphical user interfaces for the Microsoft Windows platform—but this doesn't mean that building your application with Walk limits you to Windows only. Using the techniques explored in Chapter 3Go to the Rescue!, we can set the code for Windows to be conditionally included when building for the platform, and introduce other files that could provide a user interface for other platforms.

The first step is to update the files we have built so far to only build on Windows. We do this using the build constraints comment format (you could also use file naming for this step if you wish):

// +build windows

package main

...

We then introduce a new file that will handle the fallback case when we're on a different platform. For this simple project we will call it nonwindows.go as the content will run for any computer not running Windows. In this file, we place a small amount of code that will print a failure message and...