The Walk project is one of the oldest GUI toolkits for Go, having been started in September of 2010. The name stands for Windows Application Library Kit, which reflects its purpose to support building GUI apps for the Microsoft platform. Its project home is on GitHub, where you can check out the latest developments and discussions: https://github.com/lxn/walk.

The project API was inspired by the Qt Widgets module for the Qt framework (which will be covered in Chapter 7, Go-Qt - Multiple Platforms with QT). Qt Widgets is a selection of standard user interface features for creating graphical applications with a familiar look and feel. By matching the Qt design closely, it's possible to use some of the Qt tools, such as UI designer, when preparing a Walk-based user interface for your application. Walk currently supports the most commonly-utilized widgets, which means it may not be suitable for every application. At the time of writing, the Multi Document Interface (MDI) and dockable tool windows described in Chapter 2, Graphical User Interface Challenges are not supported—though the author notes that it is an open source project and contributions are welcome.

Walk offers a great API for building applications for the Windows desktop. Although it doesn't provide the choice of themes or presentation styles that some toolkits offer, applications that use it look exactly like other Windows apps. One of the project aims is for it to work without any additional dependencies or complicated setup, which means that it's a great place to get started—as you'll see in the next section.