Gio: Portable, Immediate Mode GUI in Go

https://git.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/gio

by todd8 • 7 years ago

117 77 7 years ago

git.sr.ht

todd8• 7 years ago

It appears to support Windows, MacOS, Linux, IOS, and Android. See also this youtube video from GopherCon 2019 on this ui library:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D6eWP4peYM&t=636s

giancarlostoro3• 7 years ago

Love the idea not a fan of the tough to google name. I had issues googling for it a couple of times to show people Gio.

speps• 7 years ago

Same as Go where you search for "golang". I get good results using "gioui".

coldtea9• 7 years ago

How about "Gio golang UI library"?

What exactly is hard about that (or several similar variations) -- which give me a first page full of relevant results?

Does the term have to be "Gio" or bust?

giancarlostoro3• 7 years ago

Should I really be forced to memorize word soup to find what I am looking for though? Thats just absurd to me.

tiborsaas2• 7 years ago

No screenshots for a GUI library?

yourapostasy2• 7 years ago

Watch his Gophercon talks, around minutes 4-7 show what it’s capable of. Screenshots simply show native interfaces, so it isn’t some kind of skin that’s readily apparent from screenshots. The more interesting action happens in the code and his philosophy towards multi-platform UI.

unwind• 7 years ago

As far as I know, the "native interface" in Windows is not immediate-mode. Also Linux barely has one, so that's very confusing too. How does that work out?

I too feel the project page really could use a couple of screenshots, since when talking about visual things, pictures do help.

Update: I watched the video, it looks really nice and smooth but seems to be the basic framework on which you can build a user interface, not an actual user interface. For instance he shows off basic drawing, and support for dynamic layout of user interface elements, but no ready-made widgets. Maybe I'm still not getting the full picture.

tom_mellior• 7 years ago

Screenshots simply show native interfaces

Yeah, but accompanied by code snippets they would make a lot of sense on a GUI library's landing page. Not to advertise the look of the widgets, but to advertise the ease or flexibility of the library.

tiborsaas2• 7 years ago

That's a lazy excuse, sorry :) The talk is not even linked in the readme.

Display me what this awesome philosophy is capable of. I understand that this is somebody's side project, but come on, grab my attention, since we have a sea of GUI libraries out there. He must have built something amazing in it, just throw it there. It took me quite a while to find the slide deck link in the readme and I only kept looking because I couldn't believe that I can't see this thing in action.

zimbatm• 7 years ago

especially since it supports WebAssembly as a backend, it would be nice to get a online demo page.

wilt• 7 years ago

No x11 support?

nizmow• 7 years ago

Yeah, that makes it a no-starter for me.

vhodges2• 7 years ago

It IS being worked on but in the meantime, gio apps can be run on X using https://github.com/Hjdskes/cage (a very simple wayland compositor)

Sir_Cmpwn8• 7 years ago

I've poked around some of the gioui windowing code. It should be pretty easy to add an X11 backend if you're up for the task.

jamil72• 7 years ago

This looks really interesting to me but I'm a bit lost on how exactly it'd work in practise. Are there anymore docs somewhere?

yourapostasy2• 7 years ago

His GopherCon talks are pretty gentle tutorials. In practice, looks like your program becomes responsible for quite a bit of scaffolding that UI coders take for granted these days, in exchange for multi-platform write-once. Kind of reminds me of GUI programming back in the 80’s, where your program is responsible for managing every state refresh and screen update. It’s efficient, but I’ve seen larger teams without sufficient discipline have a challenge coping with this style. For a lot of useful problem domains however, it’s really tough to beat its time to market and efficiency. Lots of startups would probably love this.

jamil72• 7 years ago

Thanks for the detailed response, I'm going to take a look into the videos.

pixelrevision• 7 years ago

At this point electron will beat something like this on a time to market front. I suspect this framework would work better for people who want to do real-time drawing but stick with go and not setup a bunch of OpenGL boilerplate.

vhodges2• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_Mode_GUI might help.

coldtea9• 7 years ago

A GUI library with no screenshots, no widget gallery, and no (easily found) reference?

"Hosting Gio on Sourcehut is an experiment just as Gio itself is."

Yeah, nice experiment. Now maybe try GitHub?

pferde3• 7 years ago

Why further strenghten Microsoft's monopoly on developers? With several great alternatives available today, I say steer clear and as far away from Github as possible.

jdright• 7 years ago

The same can be said about Go

coldtea9• 7 years ago

99% of Go projects, and Go itself, use GitHub, so I don't see how you'd "steer clear and away" when to use Gio you'd need to be using Go anyway...

Nor is this thing used here a "great alternative".

mellosouls2• 7 years ago

This M$ = bad trope is really tired and outdated and not representative of its value to devs.

By all means encourage different hosting platforms, but maybe in a tone more relevent to the current decade.

ddevault2• 7 years ago

Rude. What's you beef with Sourcehut? "Other projects use Github" will not be accepted as an answer.

coldtea9• 7 years ago

That it's between GNU project webpages and Sourceforge circa 2002?

"Other projects use Github" will not be accepted as an answer

Well, not that I care whether it would or would not be accepted, but It would still be a valid answer: using common services others use, makes for less friction:

1) immediate familiarity for most (not having to learn yet another thing)

2) common tooling with what other projects you use, use,

3) more available tooling -thanks to popularity-

4) more dependable to be around,

5) easier to engage with others since they more likely already use it -network effects-,

and so on...

pcr910303• 7 years ago

"Other projects use Github" will not be accepted as an answer.

It's not just because "other projects use GitHub", but it's that because "other projects use GitHub", discoverability of projects that are hosted in GitHub tends to be higher than ones that do not.

Also the workflow is vastly different (AFAIK Sourcehut doesn't have web-based bug report/PR, I think you mentioned it being developed... looking forward for it) from most OSS contributors/users, and forcing a different workflow will turn them away.

I think hosting the primary repo on sr.ht with a mirror on GitHub, and getting bug reports/PRs with both services might be a better solution IMHO.

olah_14• 7 years ago

What's you beef with Sourcehut?

It's more difficult to keep up with a project that I find interesting. That's literally my only problem with it.

I want to be notified of new releases. The only option Sourcehut has right now is subscribing via RSS to every single commit.

I also don't want to have to bookmark every project I find interesting. I like that Github lets you star projects and then search or filter your starred projects. This is slightly less important for me though.

moocowtruck• 7 years ago

yea i agree, trying to look at the code etc on sourcehut was just painful the first thing i said to myself was "wish this was on github" then came here to see i wasn't alone in that sentiment!

ecnahc515• 7 years ago

Yah I immediately looked everywhere for examples, even checked out the presentation, demo links, no images of what this graphical library produces.

marcus_holmes• 7 years ago

this looks great, exactly what I need. I'll go try it out and see if it lives up to the promise :)

I guess, though, that there aren't any widget libraries for it, yet? Anyone know different?

pferde3• 7 years ago

Very badly chosen name. GIO is already GLib's filesystem abstraction API: https://developer.gnome.org/gio/

tasogare• 7 years ago

Tons of programming projects has the name of an existing project. Go itself is an illustration of that fact.

remon• 7 years ago

That'll be fun to get Google results for. I suppose we can be glad they didnt go for Go + UI, you know, GUI.

mythz• 7 years ago

Basically this is the UI FX used to build https://scatter.im

Best way to view a preview of it: https://youtu.be/9D6eWP4peYM?t=113

rob742• 7 years ago

I wanted to try this out right away, but stumbled over the fact that I don't know how to use "go get" with Sourcehut, or even if it's supported. Of course it's probably easy to find out, but a "getting started" section wouldn't hurt. The "installation" page only describes the installation of the dependencies...

Sir_Cmpwn8• 7 years ago

go get has nothing to do with github. Why wouldn't it work? Just use it the usual way. The readme directs you to a hello world program:

https://git.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/gio/tree/master/example/hello/h...

rob742• 7 years ago

Ok, after I noticed that the URL of the git repo is at the top of the page (somehow I managed to overlook it), I tried "go get git.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/gio", only to find out that wasn't correct, because the project uses a "vanity URL", so apparently I have to use "go get gioui.org/gio" or something like that. My point was that even if it's pretty straightforward for a reasonably experienced Go developer, it doesn't hurt to mention it...

deforciant2• 7 years ago

Gio looks really neat (from the demos), I will definitely try it out as I have been looking for a nice way to build desktop app for quite some time.

Other projects that I am considering to use: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails (looks very decent and I would be happy to use Vue.js for a UI bit) and Flutter with desktop support (https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding, in this case it's not directly using Go but you can bind them together).

If this would mean that I can just use Go for everything - that's great but the only concern for me I guess is just the availability of examples and widgets. I don't consider myself a good UI designer so relying on libraries is important :)

synw• 7 years ago

For Flutter desktop support consider https://github.com/go-flutter-desktop/go-flutter : imho it works better than the official Google lib actually to compile Flutter desktop guis

deforciant2• 7 years ago

Looks fantastic, thanks!

chmike• 7 years ago

On Ubuntu 19.04 I get the error message "wayland: wl_display_connect failed". Can’t run the hello program to see something.

Cogitri• 7 years ago

Do you use X11? Only Wayland is supported AFAICS

Crinus5• 7 years ago

Until they add X11 support that makes it pretty much useless for a desktop GUI (if you care about Linux anyway).

simonz05• 7 years ago

You can compile it on linux and run it through "weston"

vfclists• 7 years ago

Is it just me or do are there a lot of developers who don't believe in the saying "One picture is worth a 1000 words"? Is it a Linux thing, something peculiar to developers in the Github era?

If you go to a forum such a the Lazarus forums, any announced projects show pics on the forum itself, or on the websites linked.

It makes me long for the bad old day so of windows when showing pics of your project was all the rage and still is.

This is not just in relation to Gio, but I see so many GUI projects on Github with nary a picture in sight.

Do their developers want those intrigued to go to the effort of setting up a development environment (if that succeeds) only to find that the project is half-baked mush of an apple pie?

pier253• 7 years ago

First time I hear about immediate mode GUI. Here's a previous HN coversartion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744513

pier253• 7 years ago

Vector shapes and text can go a long way but what about rendering images, video, or even SVG for icons and such?

pier253• 7 years ago

Off topic but...

In the web world we have benchmarks for UI libraries. Is there anything similar for the native world?

I remember a couple of years ago there was the bunny mark benchmark for 2d game engines (OpenFL, Flash, Pixi, etc).

Gio: Portable, Immediate Mode GUI in Go

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