It looks like this binding has a compile option where Qt itself is statically linked into the resulting executable. That gives this stack (Go+Qt) a <i>very</i> unique deployment story.<p>There are a lot of people (I'm looking at you, console home-brew community) who build all their little tools to go along with their projects as native GUIs, usually with C# + WinForms—not particularly because they have Windows-specific functionality, but more because they have at least some <i>native</i> functionality (so Electron is out) and C#+WinForms allows them to just make releases as a standalone .exe you can "just" download and run (at least on modern Windows), without needing to first install some external runtime.<p>This could be a good <i>multiplatform</i> alternative to the C#+WinForms stack, with all the same advantages. (The only con being that statically-linked Qt is pretty dang large.)
We ship a C++/Qt/Go application at $DAYJOB. The C++ and Go parts communicate by IPC so I would love to get down to a single language - Qt is the main reason why C++ is involved at all. A Go binding for Qt (Widgets) would seriously solve a lot of issues for us.<p>But this binding is LGPL, so<p>- we can't include it in a closed-source statically-linked Go application as-is;<p>- this binding plans to offer a commercial license but it isn't available yet;<p>- dynamic linking of a Go package (i.e. `-buildmode plugin`) is possible on Linux but not on Windows.<p>There's also the similar <a href="https://github.com/kitech/qt.go" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kitech/qt.go</a> that works by LoadLibrary/dlsym'ing the Qt dll/so files, that has the same LGPL + no-commercial-alternative license.
This is much more basic but also considerably smaller.<p><a href="https://github.com/andlabs/ui" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andlabs/ui</a><p>I really wish libui had more support and momentum. It's literally the only sane cross platform UI project in existence. Everything else is not native (html5 guis), has no accessibility support (all the immediate mode ones), is ancient and ugly (wxwidgets), or is bloated (qt).
The license looks like a mess. They claim their own code is LGPL, but it looks like some of their code links to GPL modules (e.g. serialbus).<p>To my mind, this is entirely GPL and heaven help anyone who mistakes it for LGPL.
I predict that we will see a renaissance of CORBA / COM MIDL in the form of WebAPI IDL as new IPC standard, bringing interoperability back to where it was around 1995.