The Fyne project was created by Andrew Williams (the author of this book) in response to growing criticism of the complexity in existing graphical toolkits and application APIs. It was designed with the aim of being easy to use, and the Go language was chosen for its powerful simplicity. Like the Shiny project we explored in Chapter 8, Shiny – Experimental Go GUI API, its APIs benefit from being created specifically for the Go language.

As with the other widget toolkits in Section 3, Modern Graphical Toolkits, it facilitates the building of graphical applications that look identical across all platforms, rather than adopting the look and feel of the operating system.

The toolkit was initially built using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL: enlightenment.org/about-efl) to facilitate cross-platform rendering. Since then, Fyne has moved to an OpenGL-based driver, much like the nk package from the previous chapter. This makes for a much simpler setup and means that there are no runtime dependencies for apps created with Fyne. Before we examine the toolkit in detail, let's see how to set up a simple Fyne application.