4 ms·

Knowing next to nothing about Golang: Is it unlikely that someone would ever develop an actual desktop toolkit for Golang? If so, how come? From a naïve point

by Jolter 6y ago

Knowing next to nothing about Golang: Is it unlikely that someone would ever develop an actual desktop toolkit for Golang? If so, how come? From a naïve point of view, it would seem like overkill to run a whole web browser when a few kilobytes of memory is all it really takes to draw a widget on screen.

dmitriid 6y ago
"all it takes to draw a widget on the screen" is not enough to create "an actual desktop toolkit". If you need to draw a widget on the screen, there's Dear ImGui [1] that you can use from Go [2] If you're looking for a desktop toolkit, there's a reason why things like Qt are multidecade endeavours. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui [2] https://github.com/inkyblackness/imgui-go https://github.com/inkyblackness/imgui-go
grey-area 6y ago
Cross platform UI toolkits are a sisyphean task that everyone wants someone else to work on. Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target multiple ecosystems - they want a monopoly on devs and users, hence the endless churn of languages, frameworks and SDKs, making it difficult to keep up. It's much easier and more reliable to use HTML, even if the experience isn't as slick for users.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target multiple ecosystems Is this actually true? As in, I see how we may arrive at the same outcome anyway, but at this point, do those companies actually care about aggressive lock-in? - Apple seems to be more ignoring the possibility of SwiftUI on other platforms rather than actively preventing it since https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI (dead) exists. Sure, they will never help to make it happen, but "don't want"? - Google is pretty much cross-platform/-ecosystem with Flutter which explicitly supports iOS. - MS seems to have given up with Win Forms opensourced and working on .NET Core / Mono.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    "MS seems to have given up with Win Forms opensourced and working on .NET Core / Mono." MS does not care what OS you use anymore. They want users of all operating systems to order their Office 365 license and run all their cloud compute loads in Azure.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    You won' probably catch any exec from MS and Apple admitting the obvious, but it's really against their best interest to encourage multi-platform apps as this would give users a choice between operating systems. It's not something that is discussed a lot these days because modern web apps are quite powerful, yet it's clear a good quality multi-platform toolkit would be a boon to users and developers alike. As for MS open sourcing .NET Core it's all good and nice, but WinForms and WPF are still Windows-only, and according to MS they will remain this way. And Apple has no intentions of doing the same with SwiftUI.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      I haven't tried to use it in anger, but https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ "Support for Winforms 1.1 and 2.0 has been completed, and is now in a maintenance/bug fixing state." "System.Windows.Forms implements its own driver interface to communicate with the host OS windowing system. Currently, we have drivers for X11, Win32, and macOS. These drivers translate the native window messages into WndProc compatible messages, to provide as much compatibility with native .Net as possible." WPF is windows-only though.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
        To clarify: you can't use Windows Forms directly with .NET Core on non-MS platforms - you nee to port them to Mono. I tried to use Mono several times, starting from Ximian and Xamarin times, and I always encountered strange problems that were not present in the original applications. I hope they improved somewhat recently because the code produced back then was often unusable (e.g. huge leaks after a couple of hours of use.)

by Jolter 6y ago

dmitriid 6y ago

"all it takes to draw a widget on the screen" is not enough to create "an actual desktop toolkit". If you need to draw a widget on the screen, there's Dear ImGui [1] that you can use from Go [2] If you're looking for a desktop toolkit, there's a reason why things like Qt are multidecade endeavours. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui [2] https://github.com/inkyblackness/imgui-go https://github.com/inkyblackness/imgui-go

grey-area 6y ago

Cross platform UI toolkits are a sisyphean task that everyone wants someone else to work on. Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target multiple ecosystems - they want a monopoly on devs and users, hence the endless churn of languages, frameworks and SDKs, making it difficult to keep up. It's much easier and more reliable to use HTML, even if the experience isn't as slick for users.

viraptor 6y ago
> Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target multiple ecosystems Is this actually true? As in, I see how we may arrive at the same outcome anyway, but at this point, do those companies actually care about aggressive lock-in? - Apple seems to be more ignoring the possibility of SwiftUI on other platforms rather than actively preventing it since https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI (dead) exists. Sure, they will never help to make it happen, but "don't want"? - Google is pretty much cross-platform/-ecosystem with Flutter which explicitly supports iOS. - MS seems to have given up with Win Forms opensourced and working on .NET Core / Mono.
- fsloth 6y ago
  "MS seems to have given up with Win Forms opensourced and working on .NET Core / Mono." MS does not care what OS you use anymore. They want users of all operating systems to order their Office 365 license and run all their cloud compute loads in Azure.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  You won' probably catch any exec from MS and Apple admitting the obvious, but it's really against their best interest to encourage multi-platform apps as this would give users a choice between operating systems. It's not something that is discussed a lot these days because modern web apps are quite powerful, yet it's clear a good quality multi-platform toolkit would be a boon to users and developers alike. As for MS open sourcing .NET Core it's all good and nice, but WinForms and WPF are still Windows-only, and according to MS they will remain this way. And Apple has no intentions of doing the same with SwiftUI.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    I haven't tried to use it in anger, but https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ "Support for Winforms 1.1 and 2.0 has been completed, and is now in a maintenance/bug fixing state." "System.Windows.Forms implements its own driver interface to communicate with the host OS windowing system. Currently, we have drivers for X11, Win32, and macOS. These drivers translate the native window messages into WndProc compatible messages, to provide as much compatibility with native .Net as possible." WPF is windows-only though.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      To clarify: you can't use Windows Forms directly with .NET Core on non-MS platforms - you nee to port them to Mono. I tried to use Mono several times, starting from Ximian and Xamarin times, and I always encountered strange problems that were not present in the original applications. I hope they improved somewhat recently because the code produced back then was often unusable (e.g. huge leaks after a couple of hours of use.)