Let's look first at graphical app toolkits for Go that use existing widgets. These toolkits help you build applications that will match the operating system's look and feel, which is a great choice if you want to build an app that's immediately familiar to your users. This approach may have a downside, however, in the amount of testing and potential customization required for each platform you aim to support. The APIs we explore have different levels of abstraction and platform integration, so depending on your application's requirements, the effort required may vary.

This section covers three different approaches to creating GUIs that match the operating system. Firstly, we'll look at Walk, which is a Go API that's specifically for creating Windows applications. This is the most direct way to create the app you wish for the Microsoft Windows desktop, but it's not obviously portable to other platforms. After that, we'll switch to andlabs/ui, which is an abstraction for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other widget sets. The application built in that chapter will use native platform widgets while being portable to many platforms. After then, we'll look at themeable widget sets, which behave the same way across multiple platforms and load themes that match the native user interface. In this category, we'll set up applications using Go bindings for the GTK+ and Qt toolkits.

The following chapters will be covered in this section:

• Chapter 4, Walk – Building Graphical Windows Applications
• Chapter 5, andlabs UI – Cross-Platform Native UIs
• Chapter 6, Go-GTK – Multiple Platforms with GTK
• Chapter 7, Go-Qt – Multiple Platforms with Qt

So let's dive right in and build our first application for Windows using the Walk API. If you are developing for a different operating system, then this chapter may be less relevant, so you can jump to Chapter 5, andlabs UI - Cross-Platform Native UIs, where we move on to andlabs UI.