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by maccard 1077 days ago
> Apparently Go isn't good enough to write an IDE, even that it lags behind Java.

The GUI situation in go is poor, but other than that I would say go is an excellent tool to write the remainder of the IDE in.

1 comments

writing desktop UI is really difficult these days. I mean i'm not saying it used to be easier, but the amount of technologies you can use to write a web application or desktop/javascript application and easiness of creation is overwhelming, while the amount of GUI frameworks stays the same, while some of them are decaying (no new version for a long time).

So we have objective-c/swift (new!) for macos, MFC for MSVC++, WPF/UWP for C# - all those for windows, and we have QT/GTK for Linux and de facto multiplatform. That's basically all usable at the moment, but GTK is heavy on windows/mac in my opinion.

New languages bubbling up from the opensource ground meanwhile do not offer many bindings for those above, while QT had made it hard to do any reliable binding at all, apparently...

Hardly any different from going with C and C++, which could have been wrapped via CGO.
Writing c and go, and using c bindings is pretty painful compared to just writing go. It's technically possible Just like being technically correct, it's the worst kind of correct/possible.
Just like JNI, if only there were a couple of companies that would embrace JNI to create IDEs...
sorry, in theory it's okay, in practice it's much more difficult.

-- edit -- speaking of Qt

CGO supports C++.
Qt framework is not about C++. It creates another language inside with different mechanics. And most important, different memory management patterns. Sometimes the objects are managed by Qt parent object, sometimes not. I wouldn't commit to a project that would create a GUI in Qt using CGO.