In this chapter, we looked at the second toolkit of three that were designed to break away from the traditional toolkits that we looked at in Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets. The Nuklear project primarily targets embedded applications but we saw that, in many ways, it's a possible fit for desktop applications. Its bespoke widget design means that applications will look identical across all supported operating systems, which is a longer list than Shiny—including Android for mobile development.

We explored how the Nuklear framework is designed and how it interacts with various backends that provide the actual drawing and user input implementation. We examined the main API features, including its drawing capabilities, the widgets it includes, and the layout algorithms that it provides for constructing user interfaces. We then implemented the same GoMail project that was created in Chapter 4, Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications, through to Chapter 7, Go-Qt - Multiple Platforms with Qt, working through the nk APIs and features to create a complete application. There were many differences when working with an immediate mode GUI framework but, in many ways, it was easier to implement our basic application.

In the next chapter, we'll look at Fyne, the last toolkit that we'll explore in detail. As with Shiny, it's a material design inspired widget library but, similar to Nuklear, its focus is on providing a complete widget toolkit.