raywin-go

Raywin-go is a simple GUI library for embedded devices. It is built on top of raylib-go and written in Go.

The main highlights are as follows:

• Simple programming interface suitable for straightforward UI projects.
• Initially built for an embedded device running on a Raspberry Pi with a small touchpad display.
• Can work directly with the display, eliminating the need for an X server or any window-based GUI system.
• Written in pure C under the hood using raylib, which is wrapped for Go.
• Cross-platform, allowing development and debugging on a standard computer.

Quick Introduction

While working on a home-built airplane, I designed and developed an observability system using a Raspberry Pi as the UX interface (cockpit touchpad display). To maintain stability and simplicity, I avoided running Linux in a full desktop configuration and did not include any GUI desktop environment. Unnecessary services were turned off. At the same time, I needed a reliable graphical interface to control my devices. This is where raywin-go initially came into play.

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Wait. What?

Yes, this is not a library people typically use for developing UX interfaces for laptops, desktops, or mobile devices like Android or iPhone. Instead, this library is designed to be embedded into a custom Linux setup with your own hardware and display. It's quite low-level — no React, no Qt, just almost pure graphics.

How can I try this?

Raywin-go is cross-platform: it works on macOS and Linux (it should work on Windows, but it is not officially supported). Try out to run the examples on your platform from the console:

cd examples/moving_boxes
go build .
./moving_boxes

or in IDE, just click "Run". For GoLand, for example, just run the main file from the examples subfolder.

To run your project on Linux in a special configuration without a GUI desktop or X server, build your project in DRM mode (see here). For example, to run your project on Raspberry PI without GUI Desktop, use drm tag for build, something like this:

go build -tags "drm" -o ./build/ my_project_main.go

You can use other tags like noaudio etc., to control the raylib build configuration.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache Version 2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgments

• GoLand IDE by JetBrains is used for the code development