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

Getting started with therecipe/qt


To begin our exploration of Qt and the binding to Go, we'll build a simple hello world application. To be able to do so, we first need to install therecipe/qt, which depends on various prerequisites that we must first set up.

Prerequisites

As with Go-GTK, we'll be relying on a native library that requires that we both set up the CGo functionality and install the Qt library appropriate for the current platform.

Preparing CGo

The Qt Go bindings, like many of the other toolkits featured in this book, require the presence of CGo to utilize native libraries. On a full development system, it's likely that this is already set up. If you're unsure or would like a reminder of how to set up the CGo dependencies, please check the Appendix, Setting Up CGo.

Installing Qt

The Qt website (www.qt.io/download) offers various methods of installation, including a customized online installer available to anyone with a Qt account (which is free to sign up for). Typically, a Qt installation...