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

Cross compiling for Windows with CGo


Building for Windows from another platform requires an installation of the mingw toolchain (similar to that which we installed on Windows to support CGo). This should be available in your package manager with a name similar to mingw-w64-clang or w64-mingw, but if not, you can install directly using the instructions at https://github.com/tpoechtrager/wclang.

 

To Windows from macOS

To install the packages on macOS, it's recommended to use the Homebrew package manager. You probably already have this installed from earlier chapters in this book (for example, when setting up the GTK+ library), but if not, you can download it from https://brew.sh. Once Homebrew is set up, the compiler package is installed using brew install mingw-w64.

Once installed, the compiler can be used with CGo by setting CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc (for the C toolchain) and CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ (for C++ requirements).

To Windows from Linux

Installing on Linux should just require finding the correct package in your distribution's listing. For example, for Debian or Ubuntu, you would execute sudo apt-get install gcc-mingw-w64.

Once installed, the compiler can be used with CGo by setting CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc (for the C toolchain) and CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ (for C++ requirements).