Announcing a Fyne GUI toolkit

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Some time ago I realised that Go was a great language for building new applications, as I wanted to use something powerful but fast to learn. I also wanted a really simple to use GUI toolkit that worked cross platform - this was a little more difficult to satisfy!

The aim was to create an API that was:

• Simple to learn
  
• Great looking with theme options
• Truly cross platform with identical look across platforms
• Solved all of the complicated GUI challenges (threading, scaling etc)

And so the Fyne project was created https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne !

The design language is basically material design and the rendering is currently EFL with support for Windows, macOS and Linux.

It's entirely vector based (though you can draw a Raster space if you need) and scales beautifully.

For a taste of what that looks like here you go :)

It's now well into development and ready for people to get involved. There is a long way to go but it feels like a solid base.

Instructions for getting started, if you need them, are at https://github.com/fyne-io/bootstrap/blob/master/README.md .

If you want to know more we're also in the #fyne channel on the gopher Slack server.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts :)
Andrew

[Ian Davis]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018, at 6:02 PM, Andrew Williams wrote:

It's now well into development and ready for people to get involved. There is a long way to go but it feels like a solid base.

Instructions for getting started, if you need them, are at https://github.com/fyne-io/bootstrap/blob/master/README.md .

If you want to know more we're also in the #fyne channel on the gopher Slack server.

This looks very impressive.

Is it possible to interface it with opengl or vulcan?

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Thanks. There is an efl opengl driver which we could utilise instead of the sofware driver with a small change - if your hardware supports it.

It would also be possible to provide an alternative driver that communicates directly with opengl, but this is a lot more work.

I have designed the backend to be loosely coupled so that other options could be provided (i.e. we could write a webgl/webasm driver or a native mobile one). I am writing up documentation about the requirements for drivers but it is basically a canvas that can draw line/rect/text/images(including svg) and some basic window handling.

Current drivers are "desktop" which uses EFL and "test" used for in-memory unit testing of the widgets etc.

I hope that helps,

Andrew

[Fino]

great work!

the design looks quite modern!

put into my save list for Go GUI topic,

BR fino

[Andy Williams]

Hi,

I don’t know if it helps but I wrote a short document about the driver in Fyne.

https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/wiki/Drivers

Andrew

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Tharaneedharan Vilwanathan]

Hi,

Anyone having trouble installing on a Mac or am I alone?

The bootstrapping part gives me trouble. Please let me know if I need to provide more details.

Regards

dharani

[Justin Israel]

I've hit a couple issues with the bootstrap on ubuntu 16.04 and have been logging them as I find them:
https://github.com/fyne-io/bootstrap/issues

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

If you don’t have homebrew installed already it won’t work. Please feel free to contact me off list with details, or raise a ticket.

Apologies for the trouble,

Andy

--

http://andywilliams.me
http://ajwillia.ms

[Andrew Williams]

Thanks for tracking it. I had trouble with Ubuntu before, I think the packages change a lot. I will get a VM up and running and check it out.

Andy

[R Srinivasan]

1. What are the "distribution" considerations?

    Considering Windows targets - can we have all the required libraries bundled in the final executable? 

2. Can the apps be cross built? i.e. Built on Linux for macOS and windows`targets?

thanks for pointers, srini

[soun...@congotech.com]

Hi There,

I tried it to test it.

But i am getting the below error :

# pkg-config --cflags  -- eina evas ecore-evas ecore-evas ecore-input ecore ecore-evas eina evas ecore-evas ecore-input ecore evas ecore ecore-evas ecore-input evas

Package eina was not found in the pkg-config search path.

Perhaps you should add the directory containing `eina.pc'

to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable

No package 'eina' found

what path should be exported to PKG_CONFIG_PATH?

Thank u

[c...@ctis.me]

Just wanted to drop in and say that I'm very impressed with the design and quality of the examples I've seen.

Great work, and thanks for sharing!

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Great questions, thanks!

1. We can bundle in the libraries for Windows and for macOS - but on linux probably not (unless your app is LGPL/GPL due to a licensing issue that I have not found a better solution to). But distribution on Linux it is normal to depend on external libraries :).

There will be a tool included to package final binaries, but I have not got it to a satisfactory level to share yet.

2. Yes, we should be able to do cross-compilation using the standard Go tools. There is the usual challenge of enabling CGO for a GOOS build, but beyond that it should be OK. It's easier than, for example, andlabs UI as we are not linking to OS specific functionality, just the libefl abstraction.

Point 2 may change over time - as we may wish to add certain OS abstraction directly which may make cross compilaton harder.

What I was thinking about, however, was creating some app metadata format and a centralised build server to work around both build and package distribution issues...

I hope that helps,
Andrew

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

As the Fyne toolkit depends on EFL you need to either install that yourself or use our bootstrap tool[1]. If you have done one or other of those then the error you are seeing is strange, I can try to help you off-list (if so please provide info about OS etc).

I am trying to find ways to provide more helpful errors when the native deps cannot be found...!

Andrew

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Many thanks for that feedback! We have a long way to go for a full toolkit but it's close to supporting basic applications.

Being designed for the Go language makes it so much quicker and easier to develop with than other possible toolkit choices - and I'm not just saying that from a biased point of view :)

Thanks,

Andrew

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[R Srinivasan]

Thanks a bunch. I will give a serious "go".

Background - a tool that is command line now. Developed on Linux but typical user in Windows. Just cross built for windows. Want to add a minimal frontend - simple dialog. Being like a calculator - don't want to have elaborate "install" procedures. In the case of the cli - one .exe is all it takes. 

will experiment and report back.

srini

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Ah I see what you mean. The cross compiled windows file will rely on the efl library, but that can be packaged. This means that it would need to be a bigger distribution than just the exe if you want all deps shipped (I’m not too familiar with the windows terms yet).

I’ll try and get a document up about distribution which can explain better and be kept up to date.

Thanks,
Andrew

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

For anyone still interested in this project but held back by the EFL build or runtime dependency then I have good news:
* Our new default driver does not rely on additional libraries * :)

We have moved to an OpenGL driver - using go-gl and glfw so all you need is the system libraries - and nothing for the app users to install.

There are a couple of performance issues that we will be working on but it is currently capable of running all the apps that were written with the previous driver.

I hope this is helpful to some folk - apologies for reviving the old thread.
Andrew

[Sebastien Binet]

Great!

I'll give this a try.

Thanks.

-s

sent from my droid

[Mandolyte]

Hey, the thread isn't that old... but have a question since you are in the thick of GUI things: what do you think of Vulkan?

[Andrew Williams]

Hi,

Vulcan looks like an interesting project and could provide an event higher performance rendering for a Fyne driver. Unfortunately support does not seem to be as widespread as OpenGL (and there seem to be some fun driver issues) so my knowledge is currently theoretical.

Thanks,
Andrew

—
https://andy.xyz
an...@andy.xyz

--

[Chris FractalBach]

I've been experimenting with writing games in Go ever since webAssembly came out.

Are games a possible use case for the GUI?

I saw u mention you were working on...

"basically a canvas that can draw line/rect/text/images(including svg) and some basic window handling."

Which sounds like all you'd need for 2d game graphics :D

[Andrew Williams]

Absolutely games are possible :)

In our examples repo we have “life”, “bugs”(like mines) and “solitaire”(incomplete).

Maybe one of them will inspire you.

The canvas work is a little less polished than the main widget set but it should be included in our upcoming release. (Warning: circle is currently not showing)

Thanks,
Andrew

—
https://andy.xyz
an...@andy.xyz