[dfinninger]

I strongly recommend Go. It cross compiles very easily and can embed arbitrary files. I’ve used it at work to distribute to Linux, Windows, etc. it comes with a solid REST API toolkit baked into the stdlib for simple things and great libraries for more complex flows.

For what I do at work, one of the simple apps just listens on local host and serves templated html and a rest API. Also easy to bake the server and CLI (if you want one) into a single binary. So “myapp server —foo —bar” runs the server, and “myapp” can be used as a CLI interface to the REST API until you make the UI.

All of this can be done with the stdlib, no need for 3rd party tools.