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I don't write in Go but from what I read the language isn't oriented towards GUI app development. Can anyone explain why this is the case? Are there any obviou

I don't write in Go but from what I read the language isn't oriented towards GUI app development. Can anyone explain why this is the case? Are there any obvious reasons why Apple and Google haven't adopted it for mobile apps?

m00x 6y ago
> I don't write in Go but from what I read the language isn't oriented towards GUI app development. Go was created as an improvement on C/C++ with faster compile times, mostly-safe memory management, easy threading implementations and cross-platform. Usually, it'll be used in networking applications, but nothing keeps you from using Go in GUI apps. > Are there any obvious reasons why Apple and Google haven't adopted it for mobile apps? Android already has an incredible platform running on the JVM with years of work to optimize and create dev-friendly APIs. You could build a compiler that compiles Go running on the JVM and use Android APIs if you really hate Java. A lot of GUI apps now use Electron, which is easy for web frontend devs to pick up and run. Plus you can use web frameworks like React, etc to run them. The major deficit here is that it uses a ton of memory for nothing, but hopefully frameworks like Flutter will come in and take their place.
eikenberry 6y ago
It wasn't originally designed with GUIs in mind but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be bad at it. Some people don't consider Go well suited for GUI programming as most of that large GUI platforms are traditional Object Oriented frameworks that wouldn't work as well with Go. Google and Apple haven't adopted it as they were already developing languages/platforms targeting GUI development (Dart/Flutter and Swift respectively). Also Go is a young language targeting a different niche so there was nothing pushing it this way.
- joeblubaugh 6y ago
  Go is ten years old - older than Swift, as old as Dart. I don’t think any of them - maybe Swift - are terribly young at this point. I also think it’s not quite right to call Swift object-oriented, at least not any more so than Go.
joeblubaugh 6y ago
GUI Toolkits often benefit from “looser” type requirements than Go provides. Compare SwiftUI’s way of writing a static UI view to Goey’s: https://www.objc.io/blog/2019/11/05/static-types-in-swiftui/ https://www.objc.io/blog/2019/11/05/static-types-in-swiftui/ The two layouts are very similar. I’m a Professional Go Programmer, but I find the Swift example (and similar Flutter examples) much more suited to describing interfaces.

m00x 6y ago

> I don't write in Go but from what I read the language isn't oriented towards GUI app development. Go was created as an improvement on C/C++ with faster compile times, mostly-safe memory management, easy threading implementations and cross-platform. Usually, it'll be used in networking applications, but nothing keeps you from using Go in GUI apps. > Are there any obvious reasons why Apple and Google haven't adopted it for mobile apps? Android already has an incredible platform running on the JVM with years of work to optimize and create dev-friendly APIs. You could build a compiler that compiles Go running on the JVM and use Android APIs if you really hate Java. A lot of GUI apps now use Electron, which is easy for web frontend devs to pick up and run. Plus you can use web frameworks like React, etc to run them. The major deficit here is that it uses a ton of memory for nothing, but hopefully frameworks like Flutter will come in and take their place.

eikenberry 6y ago

It wasn't originally designed with GUIs in mind but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be bad at it. Some people don't consider Go well suited for GUI programming as most of that large GUI platforms are traditional Object Oriented frameworks that wouldn't work as well with Go. Google and Apple haven't adopted it as they were already developing languages/platforms targeting GUI development (Dart/Flutter and Swift respectively). Also Go is a young language targeting a different niche so there was nothing pushing it this way.

joeblubaugh 6y ago
Go is ten years old - older than Swift, as old as Dart. I don’t think any of them - maybe Swift - are terribly young at this point. I also think it’s not quite right to call Swift object-oriented, at least not any more so than Go.

joeblubaugh 6y ago

GUI Toolkits often benefit from “looser” type requirements than Go provides. Compare SwiftUI’s way of writing a static UI view to Goey’s: https://www.objc.io/blog/2019/11/05/static-types-in-swiftui/ https://www.objc.io/blog/2019/11/05/static-types-in-swiftui/ The two layouts are very similar. I’m a Professional Go Programmer, but I find the Swift example (and similar Flutter examples) much more suited to describing interfaces.