As discussed in Chapter 2, Graphical User Interface Challenges, there are many approaches to graphical applications, leaving developers to choose between native versus hybrid (packaged web apps) and designers to pick from system look and feel, a multi-platform widget set, or even a custom design. The choice you make will probably be impacted by the needs of your application and the platforms you aim to target—is performance important and do you aim for a cross-platform deployment? Go doesn't have a standard graphical toolkit, and this omission has led developers to think it's not a language to be used for coding GUI applications. However, as we've seen in this chapter, it's a great fit for graphical application development. This leads to the question: which toolkits are available to build GUI apps in Go?

Simply put: a lot. You can see a list of the major, currently-maintained toolkits online at https://awesome-go.com/#gui—there is probably an option that suits most use cases. As we are looking to build high-performance applications that look great, we'll skip the items that rely on bundling web content to create hybrid applications. That still leaves a large list! There are some that give direct access to system components for a truly native experience, and some that provide abstracted APIs for the same platform look and feel. Others provide their own rendering of the user interface, which is consistent on all platforms they support (similar to Java Swing's Metal look and feel).

As well as a great language for GUI development, Go presents us with the opportunity to choose the right GUI toolkit for our application. Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7), and Section 3, Modern Graphical Toolkits (Chapters 8, 9 and 10),  introduces developers to each of the main options, and shows how to start building beautiful graphical applications with each of them. Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets, is focused on building applications that match the operating system's look and feel, and Section 3, Modern Graphical Toolkits, is for applications that are going for a more modern look that aims to be consistent across multiple platforms.