After finishing Waku — an open-source harness he built in Rust — the big shot over at Chatwise evidently ran into some hard lessons with Rust, and quickly turned around to open-source a desktop GUI framework written in pure Go: MyGo. It supports both flavors of desktop app, letting you run a web UI inside the system webview or write a native UI in pure Go — all in just a few MB. Recommended!

egoist/mygo

Source: https://github.com/egoist/mygo

MyGo

Desktop apps in Go, with a web frontend or a native UI.

Each MyGo window shows one of two kinds of interface, and one app can mix them:

• A web page, in the webview the OS already has: WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux, WebView2 on Windows. Build the frontend with any web tools; it calls your Go code through a TypeScript client generated from it.
• Native UI, written in Go alone with package ui and drawn by MyGo itself on the GPU: no HTML, no JavaScript and no webview, so the window opens at once and takes little memory.

Either way, an app is a single Go binary of a few megabytes, focused on low memory and CPU use.

• Pure Go, no cgo: build for every platform from any machine.
• Typed IPC for pages: bind Go services, stream values through channels and send typed events; the TypeScript client is generated from your Go code.
• A Go UI toolkit for native UI: flexbox and grid layout, widgets, text editing with input methods, virtualized lists, SVG icons, animations, screen reader support, and views you test without a window.
• Desktop APIs for both: windows, menus, tray, dialogs, notifications, global shortcuts, deep links, file associations and more.
• Ready to ship: app bundles and disk images, Windows installers, Debian packages and a Linux install script, code signing, notarization, and signed auto-updates with delta updates and an update window in the manner of Sparkle.

A window with a web page, whose frontend calls Go:

``go type Greeter struct{}

// Greet returns a greeting. func (Greeter) Greet(name string) string { return “Hello, “ + name }

func main() { mygo.Bind(Greeter{}) mygo.App.WhenReady(func() { mygo.NewWindow(mygo.WindowOptions{Title: “Hello”, URL: “/”}) }) if err := mygo.App.Run(); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } } ``

``ts import { Greeter } from “./mygo”; // generated

document.body.textContent = await Greeter.greet(“Ada”); ``

A window with native UI, whose view is a Go function of the app’s state:

``go type counter struct{ n int }

func (s *counter) view(c *ui.Context) { ui.Column(c).Fill().Center().Gap(12).Children(func() { ui.Text(c, fmt.Sprint(s.n)).FontSize(40).Bold() if ui.PrimaryButton(c, “Increment”).Clicked() { s.n++ } }) }

func main() { s := &counter{} mygo.App.WhenReady(func() { mygo.NewWindow(mygo.WindowOptions{ Title: “Counter”, Content: ui.View(s.view), }) }) if err := mygo.App.Run(); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } } ``

Getting started

With Go (https://go.dev/dl/) 1.27+ and Bun (https://bun.sh), create an app with a web frontend:

sh bunx mygo-cli init my-app # or: npx mygo-cli init my-app cd my-app bun run dev

An app of native UI needs Go alone:

sh go run github.com/egoist/mygo/cmd/mygo@latest init -template native my-app cd my-app go tool mygo dev

Read the documentation.

License

MIT

EGOIST (@localhost_5173): Introducing MyGo, a pure Go framework for building desktop app in webview or native UI, it’s like GPUI and Tauri had a baby, but made in Go so it compiles fast