The answer is platform dependent:
Windows loads the relevant DLLs by hand and calls them. This is a well established technique in Go programs and due to the super stable DLL interface works well.
Linux has an x11 and Wayland backends and these implement (through a library) the wire protocols directly in Go which is nice and will make cross compilation and distribution easy.
macOS does appear to use cgo to access the cocoa libraries. macOS doesn't like statically linked Go programs anyway though as they don't use system name resolution so this isn't a bad compromise, but will mean macOS stuff needs to be built on macOS I think.
I didn't see Android or iOS support.
A nice innovative approach to GUI building. Since the lowest common denominator for the backends is an RGBA buffer, this will bypass all accessibility things the OS provides.
The above gleaned after a few minutes reading the source so may not be 100% accurate.
No Multiple Windows so even desktop apps will be limited to "utility-style apps".
I compiled and ran the process_monitor example on linux: it works, compiles fast and is about 10mb. Also cross-built for windows and it's 8.4mb. Can't build for macos/arm64
(Under wine the windows exe doesn't render text. weird.)
# go.hasen.dev/shirei/cocoabackend
../../../gopath/pkg/mod/go.hasen.dev/shirei@v0.5.0/cocoabackend/
perf_darwin.go:198:11: undefined: softRenderer
../../../gopath/pkg/mod/go.hasen.dev/shirei@v0.5.0/cocoabackend/
perf_darwin.go:208:22: undefined: softRendererHowever, when the commit history has stuff like
v0.5.0: native backends, software renderer, text input, IME
Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Co-authored-by: Composer <composer@cursor.com>
Co-authored-by: Cursor Grok 4.5 <noreply@cursor.com>
377 files changed
Lines changed: 62423 additions & 2871 deletions
It is not true that there is "lack" of human investment in the creation of this. If anything, I spent the last two weeks glued to the screen most of the time, to a degree I have never experienced before, building out all the different areas that lead to this release.
I will not mention the monetary investment because it's not the type that matters here.
Attention, which is arguably the most scarce form of investment, was invested in ample amounts.
The commit history is the publish history, not the work history.
I wonder how long till they pivot away from this belief. I feel like everyone in UI goes through this phase as some point, but in the end it doesn't scale to truly complicated UI
Admittedly I'm simplifying too much and conflating paradigms. My preference is something like "functional core, imperative shell" or maybe "immediate-mode core, retained-mode shell" if that makes sense.
I don't think that's why React got so popular. React popularized unidirectional data flow, which is different than immediate mode rendering. This readme file seems to conflate the two of those.
Now that I think of it, couldn't one argue that React itself is a retained mode UI, since it choses which components to re-render and which not to?
Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Co-authored-by: Composer <composer@cursor.com>
Co-authored-by: Cursor Grok 4.5 <noreply@cursor.com>
But: what's the real advantage at this point to having frameworks like these? I can get arbitrary SwiftUI interfaces built very quickly, with a lot of attention to macOS (for instance) idiom, and an automatically generated interface between the SwiftUI app and Go. That works pretty great. Why take the UX hit at all?
To your general point though, yes, there's a lot of uncertainty about what things it makes sense to build in the AI era. I don't have good answers for what would make sense for 10 years down the road, but at this point of time, I think a project like this actually makes perfect sense.
Now that AI can write the code for us, we need better frameworks and libraries, because a lot of what we have now is quite honestly slop.
You could say that you could get AI to maintain 3 separate codebases of the same application UI, each one targeted to a different platform, and the AI will maintain the feature parity and you won't have to worry about it.
For now, AI can take care of coding, but it does not relieve you of having to pay attention to things. If you create 2 or 3 code bases for the different platforms you target, the maintenance burden still falls on you.
But I don't know for how long the situation will remain like this.
Last year I did not think I'd be using AI for coding. I dug up a few tweets I posted last year saying that LLMs have hit a plateau and will stop improving, and that AI coding is a scam being promoted by charlatans.
I recently had a good experience creating custom UI based on ebitengine — also a cross-platform Go engine. As it is a game engine, it has this built in game drawing loop, GPU-accelerated, with some cross-platform kb/mouse input handling. And this feels like a good platform to build the layout engine and components on top of. Have you ever considered this? Or how does your approach compare to that of ebitengine? Did you try (and do you position) your library to build custom UI for some underpowered computers such as Raspberry Pi?
> ebitengine
I have considered using it as a backend, but the blocker for me was how it handles resizing: the window content will stretch while it's being resized.
Known Issues & Limitations
The following are known issues and limitations that we plan to tackle:
Large text blocks will kill responsiveness! Use the LargeText widget.
The widget catalog is aimed at developer tooling, not general consumer polish: no rich text, tree widget, or date picker yet.
There is no robust theming system. Some widgets take an accent color; custom button styles mean implementing your own (the stock Button is a usable reference). Styling can still be verbose at times.
can I run it on Android? iOS?
no? then 99.999999% of real world users cannot access it. and if it is desktop oly, what is the point? it is no better than web.
I would argue it's one of the main reasons why frameworks like Flutter stuggle with widespread adoption on desktop — it was conceived primarily as mobile-oriented, and so on desktop you're stuck with half-baked third party components for essentials such as datagrids and tree views. WinUI with its mobile heritage in UWP suffers similar problems.
GTK + Adwaita tries to straddle the fence and produces a subpar experience on both sides. Desktop data density is terrible due to mobile-minded button sizes and margins (big touch targets, bloated whitespace to make inadvertant touch interactions less frequent) and desktop-oriented widgets like tree views feel out of place on mobile.
serious vibes of shortcuts and avoiding real hard work that brings real value.
https://blog.reds.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/questa13.png
Or something like Visual Studio.
Obviously most GUIs are not nearly that complex so immediate mode can get you quite far. Its biggest limitation is that it makes it hard to do some layouts. Your GUI layout becomes dictated by your data dependencies which is quite awkward.
With respect, a single period of manic hyperfocus is not what makes a project, it is being in it for the long-haul and putting in the hours here and there even when it isn't fun any more and you have many other things you might rather be doing.
Each pane is easily isolated, can share data with a view model scoped properly, etc. Writing it in an imperative toolkit is a "oops I forgot to update my data here" kind of hell. Data binding makes it slightly less worse
I would not classify a react style renderer as "immediate mode". It has aesthetic similarities with IM GUIs, but ultimately there is a fully retained tree under the hood, that gets diffed/mutated on every update
I'm putting out something in the hopes of it being useful for others.
https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/News/tabid/177/ID/50...
and https://web.archive.org/web/20240422044352/http://www.phmain...
https://patch.com/florida/palmharbor/50-years-pride has the meaning "an acronym for "PRofitable Information by DEsign - through phased planning and control."
No.
It means that you build the UI by describing what it should look like now, based on the data / state you own, without referencing any existing "widget" object or trying to manipulate it.
Scale is not about the number of buttons, but the structure of the data.
You have a list of objects, within each objects you have several fields, some of them lists, some of them maps. within some of those sub-items you have other lists and maps, nested arbitrarily.
This would be hell to manage for a retained mode UI. You have to mirror the application data into a widget tree and keep all the elements in sync, all the way down to the arbitrary depths of it.
You'd be writing thousands of lines of code that do nothing but keep your data in sync with widget states. You'd have many one off bugs where one sub field fails to sync in some scenarios. Your only options is to be more defensive: more events, more full-resync. As a result, the codebase is complicated and the application feels slow/heavy, because updating widget states is costly.
In immediate mode, none of that matters. You don't have a parallel widget tree.
No, instead, you need to have your entire dataset in memory, and potentially rebuild your whole tree on every update. This causes quite a lot of problems for out-of-core datasets - you end up needing to maintain proxies for things like items in scrollable lists that aren't loaded into memory yet.
Are we talking about displaying tables with billions of entries? I'd like you to show me how retained mode gui scales well with that use case.
