This project creates a bare bones GUI window for any Windows/Linux/Mac with basic event handlers and graphics buffer/s ready to draw pixels to. It can be used to create simple 2D/3D graphics from 'absolute' scratch (i.e. pixels!) for games or image viewing and editing etc. Yes, there definitely libraries out there ready to go for building games or GUI's but they abstract away all the very things I want to learn.
The project uses libraries from golang.org/x/exp/shiny and golang.org/x/mobile/event and produce a blank native styled window with title bar and menu, there are no options for border styles etc. The GoDoc's, while very good have some unusual terminologies for things if you come from say a win32 background and can seem more confusing than enlightening so I thought I'd document my findings as I build up this basic windowing library from as low a level as possible. I'm also learning Go so this is as good a project as any to stretch the old grey cells with and I welcome any comments/suggestions/corrections :)
Due to limitations in the go libraries and my lack of knowledge of said lib's there will be no bells and whistles like title bar icons, message boxes, UI widgets and other things you would require for a 'proper' desktop application. For these I'd recomend one of the Go wrapped GUI frameworks such as QT, GTK or WxWidgets et al. This project is built purely for low overhead with good performance and to develop and display graphics using software rendering in Go so I wanted this to be as lean as possible.
The whole purpose of this windowing library is for learning and experimentation and to discover how these graphics libraries work under the hood. While there are good arguments for using these driver API's it's still good to know how to do basic graphics at the lower level, not only for learning but for things like micro controllers with a simple LCD screen say to build an old style arcade cabinet or an equipment monitoring console etc. Anyway, if you're reading this and you love Go and want to learn graphics, hopefully this repo will be of some use.
This repo is structured in lesson like folders that start from displaying a bare bones empty window with very basic low level events up to a fully working example library ready to go with all of the previous steps being abstracted away and ready to use.
Study the README in each folder for some more detailed explanations and observations I had while coding up the source.
For futher documentation, see the imported lib's and look for them in GoDoc, particulalry golang.org/x/exp/shiny, golang.org/x/exp/shiny/screen and mobile/event to get started with. Reading them along while reading this code will be very helpful!
NOTE: This repo is being developed on a Windows OS, as I get time I will confirm/update differences I find with other OS's