giu

Cross platform rapid GUI framework for golang based on Dear ImGui and the great golang binding imgui-go.

Any contribution (features, widgets, tutorials, documents and etc...) is appreciated!

Supported Platforms

giu is built upon GLFW v3.3, so idealy giu could support all platforms that GLFW v3.3 supports.

• Windows (only tested on Windows 10 x64)
• MacOS (only tested on MacOS v10.15)
• Linux (thanks remeh to test it)
• Raspberry pi 3b (thanks sndvaps to test it)

Features

Compare to other Dear ImGui golang bindings, giu has following features:

• Small executable file size (<3mb after upx compression for the example/helloworld demo).
• Live-update during the resizing of OS window (implemented on GLFW 3.3 and OpenGL 3.2).
• Redraw only when user event occurred. Costs only 0.5% CPU usage with 60FPS.
• Declarative UI (see examples for more detail).
• DPI awareness (auto scale font and UI to adapte high DPI monitor).
• Drop in usage, no need to implement render and platform.
• OS clipboard support.

Hello world

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	g "github.com/AllenDang/giu"
)

func onClickMe() {
	fmt.Println("Hello world!")
}

func onImSoCute() {
	fmt.Println("Im sooooooo cute!!")
}

func loop() {
	g.SingleWindow("hello world").Layout(
		g.Label("Hello world from giu"),
		g.Row(
			g.Button("Click Me").OnClick(onClickMe),
			g.Button("I'm so cute").OnClick(onImSoCute),
		),
	)
}

func main() {
	wnd := g.NewMasterWindow("Hello world", 400, 200, g.MasterWindowFlagsNotResizable, nil)
	wnd.Run(loop)
}

Here is result.

Quick intruduction

What is immediate mode GUI?

Immediate mode GUI system means the UI control doesn't retain it's state and value. For example, call giu.InputText("ID", &str) will display a input text box on screen, and the user entered value will be stored in &str, input text box doesn't know anything about it.

And the loop method in the Hello world example is in charge of drawing all widgets based on the parameters passed into them. This method will be invoked 30 times per second to reflect interactive states (like clicked, hovered, value-changed etc...). It will be the place you define the UI structure.

The layout and sizing system

By default, any widget is placed inside a container's Layout will be place vertically.

To create a row of widgets (aka place widgets one by one horizontally), use Row() method. For example giu.Row(Label(...), Button(...)) will create a Label next to a Button.

To creata a column of widgets (aka place widgets one by one vertically) inside a row, use Column() method.

Any widget which has a Size() method, could set it's size explicitly. Note you could pass negative value to Size(), it means avaiable remain width/height - value. For example, InputText(...).Size(-1) will create a input text box with longest width it's container has lefted.

Containers

MasterWindow

A MasterWindow means the platform native window implemented by OS. All sub window and widgets will be placed inside it.

Window

A Window is a container with a title bar, and could be collapsed. SingleWindow is a special kind of window who will occupy all avaialbe space of MasterWindow.

Child

A Child is like a panel in other GUI framework, it could have a background color and border.

Widgets

Check examples/widgets for all kinds of widgets.

Install

The backend of giu depends on OpenGL 3.3, make sure your environment supports it (so far as I known some Virual Machine like VirualBox doesn`t support it).

MacOS

xcode-select --install
go get github.com/AllenDang/giu@master

Windows

1. Install mingw download here. Thanks @alchem1ster!
2. Add the binaries folder of mingw to the path (usually is \mingw64\bin).
3. go get github.com/AllenDang/giu@master.

Linux

First you need to install libraries

# apt install libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev libglx-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxxf86vm-dev

Then simple go build will work.

Cross-compiling is a bit more complicated. Let's say that you want to build for arm64. That's what you would need to do:

# dpkg --add-architecture arm64
# apt update
# apt install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu g++-aarch64-linux-gnu \
    libx11-dev:arm64 libxcursor-dev:arm64 libxrandr-dev:arm64 libxinerama-dev:arm64 libxi-dev:arm64 libglx-dev:arm64 libgl1-mesa-dev:arm64 libxxf86vm-dev:arm64
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc CXX=aarch64-linux-gnu-g++ HOST=aarch64-linux-gnu go build -v

Deploy

Build MacOS version on MacOS.

go build -ldflags "-s -w" .

Build Windows version on Windows.

go build -ldflags "-s -w -H=windowsgui -extldflags=-static" .

Build Windows version on MacOS.

1. Install mingw-64.

brew install mingw-w64

2. Prepare and embed application icon to executable and build.

cat > YourExeName.rc << EOL
id ICON "./res/app_win.ico"
GLFW_ICON ICON "./res/app_win.ico"
EOL

x86_64-w64-mingw32-windres YourExeName.rc -O coff -o YourExeName.syso
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32 go build -ldflags "-s -w -H=windowsgui -extldflags=-static" -p 4 -v -o YourExeName.exe

rm YourExeName.syso
rm YourExeName.rc

Document

Check Wiki

Contribution

All kinds of pull request (document, demo, screenshots, code, etc...) are more then welcome!

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