go-gui-projects VS sciter

Here's a list of Go UI libraries and here's an article about Rust UI libraries. In general, Go has a broader ecosystem, however, Rust has Tauri, which, if you're coming from a web background, will be right up your alley, so you'll be able to put stuff on the screen, while gradually learning about Rust and set up RPCs in the Rust part of your application that you can then call from JS.

May could be one of these.

Go doesn’t really have any GUI stuff in the standard library, but there are a few different projects listed here. I would suggest scanning that list for some Mac/xib related libraries. macDriver is one that specifically mentioned Apple.

GUI (of course there are now solutions , https://golangr.com/gui/ https://z-kit.cc/ https://developer.fyne.io/ more at here: https://github.com/go-graphics/go-gui-projects )

and many https://github.com/go-graphics/go-gui-projects

Go code compiles to executables, and you can cross compile (make windows exe on linux for example). But like other people have said, it doesn't have any GUI packages in core. There are many options out there in the community, see this. Some though use native GUI's like WinUI, so that makes the cross-compile not so useful. Instead there are packages that use toolkits like GTK2 for cross-platform code. There is also an interesting package called Fyne that have made their own toolkit in Go. But lately I have been using a package that uses the web browser as its GUI, and it is called Wails V2.

Go is a language typically used for backend related systems so as far as I know GUI support is fairly limited. Here is a list of options though if you really want to use go: https://github.com/go-graphics/go-gui-projects.

Go - GUI Libraries

> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries

There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com

> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.

It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.

Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.

But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/

otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.

[1] https://sciter.com

I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:

https://sciter.com

These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)

- Windowing

-- Tabs

-- Menus

-- Painting

-- Animation

-- Text

-The compositor

-Handling input

-- Pointer input

-- Keyboard input

- Accessibility

- Internationalization and localization

- Cross-platform APIs

- The web view

- Native look and feel

On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.

I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.

https://sciter.com/