Repository navigation
Addendum go gui
An addendum to One Go App, Served Five Ways. Same spec, same shared core, same harness. Other addenda: Home.
Stack go-gui v0.96.0 · Compared with MyGo native UI mode, Fyne, Cogent · Measured 2026-11-14, same machine as the article
go-gui is fast: on the desktop it is close to MyGo's native UI mode and ahead
of Fyne and Cogent. But it has no table that fits this app. Its DataGrid
pages through large data instead of scrolling it, and draws text-only cells.
Two agent passes, one hand-built table and one on DataGrid, both ended with a
table that was quick to scroll but rough to look at and use. On Linux it has
no menu bar. For a large-data table app it is not ready; getting a polished
result would take a lot of custom work.
A Go GUI framework that draws its own widgets on the GPU (Metal on macOS, GL on Linux and Windows) and also builds to WASM for the browser, like Fyne, Cogent and MyGo's native UI mode. No webview mode, no server mode.
| Pass | Table | Built by |
|---|---|---|
First (gogui) |
hand-built: button header plus go-gui's VirtualList
|
an agent working from the spec, like the article's apps |
Second (gogui-fit) |
go-gui's DataGrid with a data source over the core, pages of 5,000 rows |
an agent under the article's second-pass rules, told to use DataGrid and fit the layout |
Desktop, median of 5 runs. Bold is the best figure in the row.
| gogui | gogui-fit | mygoui | fyne | cogent | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ready (ms) | 277 | 340 | 236 | 572 | 555 |
| Jump to row 500k (ms) | 85 | 73 | 69 | 146 | 113 |
| Table scroll, max frame gap (ms) | 17 | 16 | 13 | 40 | 19 |
| Switch to cards (ms) | 117 | 58 | 51 | 104 | 112 |
| Sort (ms) | 262 | 259 | 241 | 254 | 262 |
| Peak memory (MB) | 279 | 267 | 219 | 1412 | 513 |
| Cold build (s) | 12.7 | 13.1 | 13.7 | 19.1 | 23.5 |
| Style, blind (1 to 5, one pass) | 2 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 |
Browser (Chrome, single run, frame gaps timed by the browser for all).
| gogui | gogui-fit | mygoui | fyne | cogent | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Download, gzip (MB) | 6.5 | 6.8 | 4.0 | 12.4 | 6.9 |
| Ready (ms) | 720 | 732 | 921 | 830 | 1,453 |
| Table scroll, max frame gap (ms) | 151 | 167 | 67 | 217 | 317 |
| Cards scroll, max frame gap (ms) | 151 | 133 | 33 | 135 | 717 |
Hands-on (macOS). Menus, shortcuts, native dialogs, notification, Reveal, theme and state restore all worked, and scrolling was fast in both passes. The tables were not:
- First pass: the vertical scrollbar sat past the right edge of a wider horizontal scroll area, the detail form overflowed, the last column did not stretch.
- Second pass: the table pages (a scrollbar per 5,000-row page, prev/next and Jump below it, arrow keys stop at the page edge). Stock bars and star ratings are text, with stray lines in the bars and some stars drawn as boxes. Table content shows through a gap under the horizontal scrollbar, and the cards scrollbar does not follow the mouse wheel.
First pass
Second pass (DataGrid)
A lot of data? Fast to scroll on the desktop, close to MyGo native UI. But
the stock DataGrid pages large data rather than scrolling it, and a
continuous table means building your own.
Need cgo? Not on Linux or Windows: only libEGL at run time (plus the
Wayland libraries on Wayland), X11 in pure Go. On macOS it needs cgo for Metal.
A cgo core runs on the desktop, and in the browser through web-remote.
Web, native, or both? Both from one Go UI codebase, at about half of Fyne's download size, with visible scroll stutter in the browser.
-
Linux (the article's container check, X11 and Wayland): starts on both,
native Wayland by default. The menu bar is macOS only, with no in-window
fallback, so the app has no menus and Ctrl+Q does nothing. File dialogs run
zenity or kdialog if installed, otherwise go-gui's own in-window browser.
Notifications go through
notify-send. Real GNOME/KDE sessions and the GPU path were not tested. - Maturity: v0.96.0, released daily to weekly, with breaking changes in recent minor versions.
Code: apps/gogui/, apps/gogui-fit/ · Full results:
results/gogui/, results/gogui-fit/ ·
Method: results/HARNESS_CHANGES.md (E5), results/DEVIATIONS.md, style pass results/judge-addenda3/