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Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

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Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#131

Post by stackskipton »

bitvoid wrote: post #46
nitinreddy88 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

First comment on that Reddit thread: --- Hey folks! Kevin, product manager on Flutter and Dart here. The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams. (I think I can say that). Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people. Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others. It was a tough day...tough week. It was crazy to be seeing…

Reddit post from Project Manager is pretty pointless. If Google decides to get rid of Flutter, they are not going to tell Kevin before hand, they are likely not even going to tell Kevin boss before hand. Stadia employees were swearing up and down that Stadia was full steam ahead despite layoffs until it wasn't. When it happened, it was clear from all Twitter posting that no one except really high up Google Executives knew Stadia shutdown was coming and they didn't tell anyone.

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#132

Post by igouy »

elteto wrote: post #63
shrubble wrote: post #30

The amazing thing is that 30 years ago there were cross platform toolkits like Neuron Data and the toolkit under OpenOffice(called StarOffice originally), and yet today the options are still fragmented and imperfect. We have far better compilers and even languages for cross-platform work, so it should be easier by now.

Why would it be easier now? What does a better compiler get you in terms of building a cross-platform UI toolkit? We now have GPUs, mobile OSs with their own separate UI abstractions, the web, WebAssembly, etc. And people want write-once deploy anywhere. You didn’t have any of that 30 years ago.

> You didn’t have any of that 30 years ago.

"Ubiquitous Applications: Embedded Systems to Mainframe"

"To support a variety of platforms, Smalltalk uses a virtual machine approach to portability that allows applications to be easily migrated between platforms with little or no change to the code."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/226239.226264

~

"… Smalltalk developers can work and deploy on Linux, Windows, AIX®, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and OS/2®. You can also create applications to be deployed on the mainframe with VisualAge Smalltalk Server for OS/390 and z/OS."

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/archive/ENUS202-10...

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#133

Post by suby »

mort96 wrote: post #70
DrDroop wrote: post #8

Experience report: Impossible to write any serious complex application in this. Lacks components for basic things everyone gets for free on other platforms, things like video, maps or rich text components. Nor does if offer any clear easy path to add them yourself. Breaking API changes every few months. No way to theme something. Immediate mode graphics are great until you need to start managing some complex state, t…

> Breaking API changes every few months. I find this to be the case with a depressing amount of Google code. They do not seem to have a culture which values not breaking their users' code.

It's even a core point for Carbon, their hopeful C++ replacement

Under language goals on their readme,

> We also have explicit non-goals for Carbon, notably including:

> * A stable application binary interface (ABI) for the entire language and library

> * Perfect backwards or forwards compatibility

There's also this blurb

> Our goals are focused on migration from one version of Carbon to the next rather than compatibility between them. This is rooted in our experience with evolving software over time more generally and a live-at-head model. Any transition, whether based on backward compatibility or a migration plan, will require some manual intervention despite our best efforts, due to Hyrum's Law, and so we should acknowledge that upgrades require active migrations.

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#134

Post by luismedel »

anthk wrote: post #106
avhon1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java was introduced slightly before the cutoff -- 23 May 1995, so almost exactly 29 years ago. The earliest ancestor of its Swing desktop GUI library, called Internet Foundation Classes, was released 16 December 1996.

Inferno looked nice.

The toolkit was Tk, IIRC.

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#135

Post by lessisless »

brabel wrote: post #7
bsaul wrote: post #2

A bit off-topic, but what's the best method to build cross-platform mobile & web apps nowadays ? I'm talking either business logic + UI , or just business logic ? like gomobile, rust, typescript, etc ? At some point i thought about using typescript for all business logic, as it seemed the most portable tech, but i realized there's no good way to have decent performance running javascript on iOS.

The best option is probably Flutter right now: https://flutter.dev/ If you don't mind writing the UI native, sharing only business logic code, Kotlin is an option: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html#kotlin-multip... Kotlin also can do the UI if you use Compose: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/ ... however, iOS support is still in alpha, and Web is "experimental". If you're not willing t…

A long time ago, nativescript[1] seemed to be a strong alternative to reactnative. Is that still the case?

[1] https://nativescript.org/

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#136

Post by buildbuildbuild »

PhilippGille wrote: post #117
999900000999 wrote: post #108

I built a small app in Go using Fyne. Never again. Both Gio and Fyne lack tons of polish and features Flutter provides. I built my core logic in Golang, and then decided to wrap it in an Android app. The GUI feels like it came out of 2003 with limited ways to fix it.

A different option is Wails [1], which allows you to write all logic in Go, and the UI in HTML (with any or no web framework). It's like Electron but lighter because it doesn't ship Chrome but uses the system's web viewer instead. [1] https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

Wails is great. Also, see Tauri for a similar lightweight approach in the Rust ecosystem.

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#137

Post by mdhb »

scosman wrote: post #54
bsaul wrote: post #2

A bit off-topic, but what's the best method to build cross-platform mobile & web apps nowadays ? I'm talking either business logic + UI , or just business logic ? like gomobile, rust, typescript, etc ? At some point i thought about using typescript for all business logic, as it seemed the most portable tech, but i realized there's no good way to have decent performance running javascript on iOS.

Native UI for anything that requires polish. I’ve been through too many iterations of frameworks that promise everything and don’t deliver. You’re up and running faster, then soon after you’re patching the core libraries after an OS update to try to get the FPS closer to native, or match a system animation more closely. The time saving only exist if you never polish your UI. Core logic can be shared. I use gomobile -…

I don’t think that premise of “native UI for anything that needs polish” is true these days.

Canonical the company behind Ubuntu have said for some time now that all future app UIs of theirs would be done in Flutter starting with the very first thing people see the installation process.

Google just rewrote Google Earth’s UI in Flutter.

BMW are doing all of their in-car entertainment systems in Flutter.

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#138

Post by wiseowise »

supportengineer wrote: post #120
shrubble wrote: post #30

The amazing thing is that 30 years ago there were cross platform toolkits like Neuron Data and the toolkit under OpenOffice(called StarOffice originally), and yet today the options are still fragmented and imperfect. We have far better compilers and even languages for cross-platform work, so it should be easier by now.

Yes, as a longtime software developer people have been trying to solve this problem different ways my entire career. The closest we got was Java swing. And it works well enough for things like eclipse but for some reason, nobody wants to use it and they want to use things like Electron instead

Isn’t Eclipse written using SWT?

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#139

Post by peddling-brink »

lakomen wrote: post #51
kitd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Go land, there's Wails https://wails.io/

What are all the target platforms? The website doesn't have a list, or I'm unable to find one. EDIT: never mind, I found it https://wails.io/docs/reference/cli#platforms It doesn't seem to support Android, IOS or web.

Wouldn’t those be the server platforms?

Re: Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

#140

Post by mdhb »

mort96 wrote: post #70
DrDroop wrote: post #8

Experience report: Impossible to write any serious complex application in this. Lacks components for basic things everyone gets for free on other platforms, things like video, maps or rich text components. Nor does if offer any clear easy path to add them yourself. Breaking API changes every few months. No way to theme something. Immediate mode graphics are great until you need to start managing some complex state, t…

> Breaking API changes every few months. I find this to be the case with a depressing amount of Google code. They do not seem to have a culture which values not breaking their users' code.

This isn’t true in Flutter. They literally bake into the CLI with each release which will automatically identify and upgrade any parts in your application using old APIs without any intervention required. It’s literally the opposite of what you’re describing here.

https://docs.flutter.dev/tools/flutter-fix

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