<p>I've been working mostly in Java and TypeScript for the past year, and looking to expand my stack. So I went through Go Tour and while some of the syntax looks wierd for me, I must admit that elegance of go tool and concurency almost won me over. However go seems to be targeted mostly at web apps, and I wonder if there is any development focused on desktop use of go going on, and how well does it work on desktops now? </p>
<hr/>**评论：**<br/><br/>kostix: <pre><blockquote>
<p>web apps</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No, that's too narrow.
It's primarily targeted at writing (networked) server-class applications.
These days this indeed often means speaking HTTP, but not always—various RPCs are often
used, and so are messaging systems.
To sum it up, Go thrives in what is colloquially called "the backend".</p>
<p>As to the essense of your question, the answer is two-fold, I'd say:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>No, the Go ecosystem does not currently has a "rock-solid" solution for desktop
GUI. By rock-solid I mean both something like Tk, which is cross-platform albeit
maybe a bit limited compared to more narrowly-scoped toolkits, and something
like .NET's Winforms or WPF.</p>
<p>There are various efforts with providing a solution which would not
involve a 3rd-party GUI toolkit.
The most visible one is supposedly <a href="https://github.com/golang/go/issues/11818" rel="nofollow"><code>shiny</code></a>
and <a href="https://github.com/andlabs/ui" rel="nofollow"><code>github.com/andlabs/ui</code></a>.</p>
<p>Both are far from being what you'd typically call "production-ready".
But then there's the question of what level of functionality you need.</p></li>
<li><p>On the other hand, there are working bindings to GTK3, Tk and Qt/QML.</p>
<p>They work, but they lack the same level of integration with the rest
of the runtime, say, Tk has with Tcl or WPF has with .NET.
I mean, to build an app using these binding you need
a working C (or C++—for Qt) compiler, and hence cross-platform development may
be difficult. And you mostly loss the glorified property of no-brainer
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOPY_deployment" rel="nofollow">"xcopy deployment"</a> of programs
written in Go—as in the case of using a 3rd-party GUI toolkit they start being linked
with the dynamic libraries of that toolkit.</p>
<p>For a list, you might start with <a href="https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go#gui" rel="nofollow">this</a>.
The things it's missing for some reason are:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/nsf/gothic" rel="nofollow">This integration with Tcl/Tk</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/go-qml/qml" rel="nofollow"><code>go-qml</code></a></li>
</ul>
<p>See also <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/6dcu48/golang_gui_framework/" rel="nofollow">this</a>
and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4aqa9q/is_goqml_dead_anyone_using_it_in_production/" rel="nofollow">this</a>.</p></li>
</ul></pre>tadvi: <pre><p>Go does not have solid desktop GUI solution. </p>
<p>If GUI has to target only one platform it is not hard to build. I only ever needed to target Windows. It took about 2 months to build library that targets Win32 via syscalls. </p>
<p>Result is this application:
<a href="https://recoink.com" rel="nofollow">recoink.com</a></p>
<p>Syscall lets you hook up message loop and do all regular Win32 SendMessage calls.</p>
<p>There are also few specific <strong>tricks</strong> when building desktop GUI for Windows:</p>
<ul>
<li>Embedding icons into binary done via rsrc tool available on github.</li>
<li>Building using "go build -ldflags="-H windowsgui" because you do not want command prompt open when app is launched.</li>
<li>Redirecting log into a file.</li>
<li>Error handling requires work since some errors need to be displayed to the user as pop ups or status bar messages.</li>
</ul>
<p>There is basic release.bat file example:</p>
<pre><code>rsrc -manifest app.manifest -ico=app.ico,document_empty.ico,control_play_blue.ico
go build -ldflags="-H windowsgui"
</code></pre>
<p>Summary: Go can be used for GUI development. It works great. Unfortunately requires initial time investment to get whole foundation build up. I hope one day Go comes with solid libraries for desktop GUIs.</p></pre>kostix: <pre><p>Thanks for the insights.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, recoink.com appears to be down for me.
Am I correct that the product you're referring to is some OCR tool
having been discussed, for instance, <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Golang-Nuts/Vny646pRkgE" rel="nofollow">here</a>?</p></pre>vectorhacker: <pre><p>Go is a general-purpose language. It's well suited for lots of work, not just web apps. Being that it was designed in Google it was designed to handle many of the situations that arise in web and server programming very well, this is why the Go standard library has no many networking, encoding, templating, and other capabilities out of the box and why concurrency is so important in the language. </p>
<p>That said, there's no reason from a language perspective why Go cannot be used to create robust desktop applications. One approach is that perhaps you shouldn't be writing the GUI components in Go, but instead use another language or framework for that, like C, C++ or an electron frontend, and have Go be the language that does the heavy lifting of your app's business logic. Go interfaces well with the C language after all, so there's no reason you couldn't use the C bindings for GUIs which almost every operating system and GUI library have.</p></pre>gac_web: <pre><p>Go is not capable of displaying any graphics without syscall hacks or C via CGO, so you need some external dependencies that are not coded in Go. So your best bet is to write a server and use whatever browser the user is using on his system to display a GUI. </p>
<p>Frankly, most integration with third party GUI toolkits isn't very good. Sure, you can use Gtk for instance, then try to develop custom Gtk widgets with Go... it obviously does not work well.</p></pre>
