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

Chapter 6. Go-GTK - Multiple Platforms with GTK

We've explored toolkits that connect directly to an operating system's native widget set (Walk for Windows only and andlabs UI for Windows, macOS, and Linux) in Chapter 4Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications, and Chapter 5, andlabs UI - Cross-platform Native UIs. In this chapter and the next (Chapter 7, Go-Qt - Multiple Platforms with Qt), we'll look at widget toolkits that were designed to look similar to traditional native widgets while being built for multi-platform distribution. In each chapter, we'll work with a popular Go binding that provides access to most of the functionality of the underlying API.

In this chapter, we'll explore Go-GTK, the most popular Go binding to the GTK+ widget library. We'll cover the following:

  • GTK+ background
  • Getting started with Go-GTK
  • Signals and namespaces
  • Sample application
  • Theming

By the end of this chapter, you'll be familiar with GTK+ and the Go-GTK library, having explored a few example applications...