Building GUI Applications with Fyne and Go (Golang)

Many developers are intimidated by the idea of writing a desktop application, and this is probably because of the rise of web based applications. In fact, some university computer science programs do not even devote an entire course to developing GUI applications, and that’s unfortunate.

Go, sometimes referred as Golang, has quickly risen in popularity over the past decade, and has become extremely popular for building REST APIs, back end applications, and network software. One question that comes up a great deal online, though, is how one might go about building a desktop application using Go. For quite some time, the default answer was use Qt and CGO bindings, but several years ago a new project emerged one that makes it relatively easy to build GUI applications in pure Go: the Fyne project. Fyne is a project is based around the premise that it should be free and simple to develop an application that can run on all platforms without modification or adaptation. Fyne apps are installed like regular applications on all platforms and deliver great performance and solid user experience.

With Fyne, you can write your code once, in pure Go, and deliver applications that run on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux, Android devices, iOS devices, and as WebAssembly in the browser.