5.3 KiB
Native UI library for Go
THIS PACKAGE IS UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT. Feel free to start using it, but mind: it's far from feature-complete, it's still in need of testing and crash-fixing, and the API can (and will) change. If you can help, please do! Run ./test to build a test binary test/test which runs a (mostly) feature-complete UI test. Run ./d32 ./test to build a 32-bit version (you will need a cgo-enabled 32-bit go environment, and I have only tested this on Mac OS X).
This is a simple library for building cross-platform GUI programs in Go. It targets Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unixes, and provides a thread-safe, channel-based API. The API itself is minimal; it aims to provide only what is necessary for GUI program design. That being said, suggestions are welcome. Layout is done using various layout managers, and some effort is taken to conform to the target platform's UI guidelines. Otherwise, the library uses native toolkits.
ui aims to run on all supported versions of supported platforms. To be more precise, the system requirements are:
- Windows: Windows 2000 or newer. The Windows backend uses package
syscalland calls Windows DLLs directly, so does not rely on cgo. - Mac OS X: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or newer. Objective-C dispatch is done by interfacing with libobjc directly, and thus this uses cgo.
- Note: you will need Go 1.3 or newer for this verison, as it uses a single .m file due to technical restrictions (read the comments in
bleh_darwin.mfor details), and earlier versions of Go do not auto-build .m files.
- Note: you will need Go 1.3 or newer for this verison, as it uses a single .m file due to technical restrictions (read the comments in
- Other Unixes: The Unix backend uses GTK+, and thus cgo. It requires GTK+ 3.4 or newer; for Ubuntu this means 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) at minimum. Check your distribution.
ui itself has no outside Go package dependencies; it is entirely self-contained.
To install, simply go get this package. On Mac OS X, make sure you have the Apple development headers. On other Unixes, make sure you have the GTK+ development files (for Ubuntu, libgtk-3-dev is sufficient).
Package documentation is available at http://godoc.org/github.com/andlabs/ui.
For an example of how ui is used, see https://github.com/andlabs/wakeup, which is a small program that implements a basic alarm clock.
Known To Have Ever Been Built Matrices
For convenience's sake, here are matrices of builds that I have personally done at least once. Each cell represents the run status. These matrices represent builds that I have done at any point in development; it is not a guarantee that the current version works. (I built this list to answer questions of whether or not ui works with a specific configuration.) Only configurations marked with a * are tested during active development.
| 386 | amd64 | arm | |
|---|---|---|---|
| windows | works on windows; works on wine* | works on windows; fails on wine | (invalid) |
| linux | see table below | see table below | Raspian: works |
| darwin (Mac OS X) | works* (cross-compiled from 64-bit) | works* | (not applicable) |
| dragonfly | untested | untested | ???? |
| freebsd | untested (VM failure) | untested (VM failure) | untested |
| netbsd | untested | untested | ???? |
| openbsd | untested | untested | ???? |
| solaris | ???? | Oracle Solaris 11: GTK+ 3 not available from official repos | ???? |
| plan9 | (not written yet; problems building Go) | untested | ???? |
| nacl | (not sure how to handle) | (not sure how to handle) | ???? |
| linux | 386 | amd64 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kubuntu (14.04) | works; cross-compiling on 64-bit Linux fails due to nonexistent .so symlinks | works* | |
| Fedora | untested | untested | |
| openSUSE | untested | untested | |
| Arch Linux | untested | untested | |
| Mandriva (TODO choose between PCLinuxOS and Mageia - it appears the original Mandriva is either dead or nonfree and I would rather choose the fork that structures packages identically for parity; do they both?) | untested | untested | |
| Slackware | untested | untested | |
| Gentoo | untested | untested |
(The above list should cover all the bases of major Linux distributions and variants thereof; I might add a dedicated Debian test later but other than that... suggestions welcome. Kubuntu 64-bit is my main system and the main development platform; the Windows builds are cross-compiled from here. And yes, this also implies I seriously consider a Plan 9 port of the library using libcontrol, though I'm guessing this will blow up in my face due to any possible conflicts between libthread and Go's runtime (I need to see how the Go runtime implements OS threads on Plan 9).)
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. File issues, pull requests, approach me on IRC (pietro10 in #go-nuts; andlabs elsewhere), etc. Even suggestions are welcome: while I'm mainly drawing from my own GUI programming experience, everyone is different. I have received emails, however I am not likely to see those right away, so I don't suggest contacting me by email if your communication is urgent.
If you want to dive in, read implementation.md: this is a description of how the library works. (Feel free to suggest improvements to this as well.) The other .md files in this repository contain various development notes.
Please suggest documentation improvements as well.