Matcha: Mobile apps in Go | Hacker News Reader

Matcha: Mobile apps in Go

gomatcha.io

168 pointsingve28 comments

Put the product itself aside, that home page is wried.

In the "Examples" section, every <video> is nested in a <a>.

Because of that, I can't play any demo by directly click the play icon (Even one on the control bar) at least on Firefox.

Luckily my cat told me that I can just right click on that demo and select play on the pop menu. Otherwise I could never see those demos in my entire life and just close that page instead.

I don't have the problem on Firefox Nightly, even though the nesting is still questionnable...

Guess that's why professional front end developer and their experiences is so important :D

Gosh thanks for the tip! Was about to come here to comment in frustration!

How does this compare to flutter?

It's similar to React Native - meaning it's very hard to write once on two platforms. You could get somewhere with writing two UI's for two platforms and keep shared business logic.

So, this is nowhere near Flutter.

Because mobile apps just have to be written in Go? There’s just nothing else out there that can handle the highly special and rare use case of UI programming? ;)

Probably a cool hobby project (and there’s nothing wrong with having hobbies!) but in it’s current state I don’t feel this to be too useful.

Just thinking aloud from my rear end: how about making a cross-platform framework with Swift? It already works well in the other major platform :)

kotlin might be a better choice - there's already projects like robovm (...bought & killed by MS), multi-os engine(intel-backed), and so on...

You don't even need those anymore – Kotlin/Native targets iOS directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15712015

Seems to have a weird bridge it has to serialize things and send them across to get them to the native side... ala React Native. I say weird, because go should be native by itself, thus no need for this hoop-jumping.

What would you recommend to use for desktop GUI apps written in Go?

I search for a good Go GUI toolkit ever now and then and there aren't really any satisfactory ones yet.

There is Walk but it is Windows-only.

https://therecipe.github.io/qt/ I've seen this being used in a few projects.

Yeah but I feel like if I'm going to use Qt I may as well write it in C++. Part of the reason I like Go is that it makes easy-to-distribute binaries. Adding Qt back in gets rid of that benefit.

A friend used walk (Windows-only, as other comment says) for a commercial project. AFAIK it worked okay.

There is also shiny, an experimental one from the Go team; not checked it, and may not be production-ready yet.

https://github.com/golang/exp/tree/master/shiny

Shiny is missing a lot of desirable features (full-screen, window positioning, disallowing window scaling) and is no longer being maintained, unfortunately.

Thanks for the info.

https://therecipe.github.io/qt/

how does it compare to go mobile?

[Edit] Looks like go mobile, still needs Mac/XCode to develop iOS apps and Android Studio to develop android apps. I haven't found another mobile development tool, other than Adobe AIR SDK, which supports developing iOS apps on windows and supports developing Android apps without Android SDK.

IIRC, Go Mobile has no UI layer. It's designed for creating cross platform libraries that you use in existing apps, or otherwise layer with native functionality.

This has a UI library and seems to more of an end to end solution.

For games I believe Unreal Engine 4 works on Windows for iOS as long as you stick to Blueprints and no C++.

didn't know this. Thanks for the info.

Maybe you are looking for React Native + Expo. You can develop iOS / Android apps without Android Studio or Xcode installed