I talked to our Go architect (and who uses Xojo) about this and he’s of the opinion that neither are ready for prime time consumption. Give them a few years to mature.
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Here lies so much of the problem - they want you to buy the product but don’t want to fix it or improve it.
Whereas people like B4X you ask if somethings possible one day on the forum and the next day you have an updated library and a sample application. (I’m sure not every request is that quick, but that was amazing service which makes me confident in using B4A and B4i) .
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When it will be, it will be obsoleted in favor of Dart+Flutter for visual interfaces and several tasks.
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should be
until this all arrives in a full production release its no more than wishware
or hopeware
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that’s exactly the problem! There is no sense behind relying on a not existing infrastructure and building projects on it. I have many projects, also frameworks, which are dangerous. A few while they are brilliant but one man shows, a few while they are brilliant but not maintained anymore an a few while they are brilliant but buggy like hell. There are many reasons to select development Software for a Software project. Simplicity should not be the first criteria for selection.
When selecting a toolchain for Software production there has to be a for sure functioning development environment with a broad range of bug fixing and bug handling and a programming language with compiler toolchain (or Scriptserver-toolchain) which is not only available but also maintained with updates in a working and acceptable manner.
And yes. Looking on C++, Java, C#, Xcode we will see exactly this. These are heavily maintained. Or in case of the IDE: looking on Xcode, Visualstudio, IntelliJIdea, Netbeans or Eclipse: they are heavily maintained with updates and functional enhancements. Nearly every day something is changed and some bugs are corrected.
Doing the stupid error to select a tool which is “independent” and “long term in the market” and “with Updates and Bugfixes” and even with “fast binary fixes” in support agreements how ever ends in many cases up in a broken project which nobody can really maintain. if it is because of the needed workarounds, if it is because of the amount of changes from version to version.
And yes, there is always a way. Even for users which say: “I am a citizen” it is possible to learn another language like C#, Java and to work with it. Or Kolin (not to forget) which gives ability to run in JVM or outside of a JVM.
All the discussion around “oh, that is a wonderful tool, this is the best I have ever seen, with this you can do that so blazing fast” has always to see what it will mean to rely on this project.
So you are so pessimist that think that Go+Fyne or GUI may never be ready?
Well, that’s not really important.
Hey, they are expanding. If we have experts passing by here, here is it:
Flutter and Dart team job openings
Flutter and Dart teams are hiring! The following jobs are open (April/22):
Software Engineering
- Engineering Manager, Mobile Platforms & Ecosystem
- Windows Engineer
- Android Engineer
- iOS Engineer
- Flutter Engineering Productivity
- Flutter CLI and Tools
- Flutter Web Engineer
- Framework Engineer
- Dart at Google Engineer
- Flutter & Dart Developer Experience SWE
- Flutter & Dart Native Runtime Engineer
Developer Relations
Product Management & UX
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I dont know to be honest
I’ll kik tires with them but not committing to any production long term development until I see it “released”
C# and .Net core on macOS are in that same boat
Looks like it should be pretty robust but its not “shipping”
I used to work for this company when it was called recital as a lead developer. It was a good product but you had to pay runtime costs for every product you compiled. I’m still in touch with bary Mavis the owner and designer of the product.
I worked for them since the 80’s and they have lasted longer than a lot of modern companies !
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A lot of the back end services in google are written in golang, so I’m sure it must be stable by now, fyne however is a really basic link to front ends, it needs to be drag and drop and more modular before I think it can hit prime time.
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I’m not confident that investing time in Go+some UI framework would be a good thing to do as I said, as we have definitively more mature things being professionally developed and the MacOS + Linux versions are being released soon in their stable versions probably until the end of Q2 joining the Windows Stable version. Unhappily right now it would be much like a giant tablet app than a native desktop, but the multi-window version “desktop like” is coming, and Q3 and Q4 may be the time for such release. If you track what is going on, you can’t call such things as hopeware, there’s a firm noticeable commitment being done there.
Yes go as a back end language isnt the issue
The UI toolkits arent there yet for making apps for many platforms
For Go developers I would suggest checking out Dittofi.
Just completed one web application on it for a client.
without knowing how to write a single line of code in Go!!
Looks nice except that the semi useless account allowing 1 app and no custom SQL and no tuning of the code, costs $30/month. And the real starter, also limited to 3 apps, is $250/month.
Speaking of Dart/Flutter and for those that may not be in the know … the stable release for [Windows support was released released (Feb 03, 2022)] Flutter Update: Windows - YouTube
Looking a bit further into the future, and this is just my opinion - there may be a major transition period for Google (and developers) as they attempt to move away from the JVM to their own kernel (Zircon) and OS (Fuschia) with their own languages like Dart, FIDL with C/C++ for low-level code. Go and Rust are listed but with restrictions. It was a financial boon for Kotlin to be considered a “first-class” language in 2017 and “preferred” language in 2019 by Google for Android development. But I see this as only a stop-gap measure in order for Google to 1) have time to develop their the Fuschia OS 2) start distancing themselves from Java since their bitter legal dispute with Oracle. The Fuschia Programming Language Policy is an interesting read as they go through various selected languages listing the tentative pros and cons of each and what each of their roles may be. Kotlin is not listed. I imagine JetBrains sees the writing on the wall and is transitioning their language, Kotlin, to being a compiled language, Kotlin Native (currently in Alpha) vs being dependent purely on the JVM. Kotlin is a very nice language and it’s a deft move on JetBrains part, I would say. 
But then again, perhaps Fuschia OS is just a very interesting ‘side project’ that may never come to fruition. But then again, " Google is officially releasing its Fuchsia OS, starting w/ first-gen Nest Hub
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Personally I’m not buying into the future, again, until its arrived
Bitten more than once by the “its coming soon. REALLY!” and made plans based on it.
Only for it to never arrive
I’ll watch but I’m not planning based on those things
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Sounds like the ‘promises’ about Android from at least 2017 if not before. Still waiting and still won’t be close to as good as B4A.
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Fuchsia
Google said they have no plans to abandon Android to another OS. In short term, Fuchsia is just an IOT OS, able to scale to larger and complex devices.
Its current goal is to power some Google devices with simple or no user interfaces.
I guess that Android will evolve over time and slowly will discard a VM in favor of just a kernel plus a framework, running all natively, like Fuchsia does.
The “native” programming language for Fuchsia apps is Dart and the UI toolkit is Flutter.
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Agreed. 