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Autogenerated GTK4+Adwaita bindings for Go leveraging ebitengine/purego

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# Moved to Codeberg

This project has moved to [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/puregotk/puregotk). This GitHub repository is no longer actively maintained.

---

# Puregotk

> **_NOTE:_**  This library is currently expiremental and needs thorough testing. Some APIs might be incorrectly exposed

Autogenerated GTK4+Adwaita bindings for Go leveraging [purego](https://github.com/ebitengine/purego)

# Motivation
I created this library because I found that alternative libraries using Cgo had much too slow compilation speed. For my laptop around 15 minutes to build a simple example (*without build cache*) for [gotk3](https://github.com/gotk3/gotk3) and also [gotk4](https://github.com/diamondburned/gotk4). Whilst this is maybe not a big problem for development, I found it annoying for CI and package building where you would not want to rely on a cache. Additionally, having [Cgo](https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/cgo) involved means harder cross compilation.

This is not a fault for these libraries as CGo compilation is just inherently slow in Go. In this project I want to test a new approach by levering purego which allows you to load libraries using dlopen without needing cgo.

Compilation speed currently is around 40 seconds for me on basic examples.

## Available libraries

Bindings for the following GObject-introspectable libraries are currently generated from the [GNOME Flatpak SDK](./copygir.sh):

* [Adw-1](./internal/gir/spec/Adw-1.gir)
* [cairo-1.0](./internal/gir/spec/cairo-1.0.gir)
* [Gdk-4.0](./internal/gir/spec/Gdk-4.0.gir)
* [GdkPixbuf-2.0](./internal/gir/spec/GdkPixbuf-2.0.gir)
* [Gio-2.0](./internal/gir/spec/Gio-2.0.gir)
* [GLib-2.0](./internal/gir/spec/GLib-2.0.gir)
* [GModule-2.0](./internal/gir/spec/GModule-2.0.gir)
* [GObject-2.0](./internal/gir/spec/GObject-2.0.gir)
* [Graphene-1.0](./internal/gir/spec/Graphene-1.0.gir)
* [Gsk-4.0](./internal/gir/spec/Gsk-4.0.gir)
* [Gtk-4.0](./internal/gir/spec/Gtk-4.0.gir)
* [JavaScriptCore-6.0](./internal/gir/spec/JavaScriptCore-6.0.gir)
* [Pango-1.0](./internal/gir/spec/Pango-1.0.gir)
* [PangoCairo-1.0](./internal/gir/spec/PangoCairo-1.0.gir)
* [Soup-3.0](./internal/gir/spec/Soup-3.0.gir)
* [WebKit-6.0](./internal/gir/spec/WebKit-6.0.gir)

If you want to add bindings for another GObject-introspectable library to puregotk, you can either add the GIR file to [internal/gir/spec](./internal/gir/spec) in this repository or generate the bindings in your own external repository (see [examples/mylib-gtk-meson-go](examples/mylib-gtk-meson-go)).

## Advantages

No Cgo needed, thus:
* Easy cross compilation
* No C toolchain needed
* Much faster compile times than alternatives like [gotk3](https://github.com/gotk3/gotk3) & [gotk4](https://github.com/diamondburned/gotk4)
  
## Disadvantages

Limitations of this library as compared to the alternatives using cgo:
* Some APIs are not possible due to purego not currently supporting struct arguments (that are not pointers)

# Planned features
In order of priority:
* General code cleanup
* Support for OS other than Linux (I only test on Linux currently)
* GTK 3 support
* Architectures other than AMD64/ARM64

# Basic example

> You can find more examples for advanced features, such as GObject subclassing for custom widgets, writing GObject GTK libraries in Go, generating bindings from external GIR files, using Meson and Flatpak, Blueprint files and more in [examples](./examples)

```go
package main

import (
	"os"

"github.com/jwijenbergh/puregotk/v4/gio"
	"github.com/jwijenbergh/puregotk/v4/gtk"
)

func main() {
	app := gtk.NewApplication("com.github.jwijenbergh.puregotk.gtk4.hello", gio.GApplicationFlagsNoneValue)
	// cleanup, no finalizers are used in this library
	defer app.Unref()
	// functions with callback arguments take function pointers
	// this is for internal re-use of callbacks
	actcb := func(_ gio.Application) {
		activate(app)
	}
	app.ConnectActivate(&actcb)

if code := app.Run(len(os.Args), os.Args); code > 0 {
		os.Exit(code)
	}
}

func activate(app *gtk.Application) {
	window := gtk.NewApplicationWindow(app)
	window.SetTitle("purego")
	label := gtk.NewLabel("Hello, World!")
	window.SetChild(&label.Widget)
	// cleanup, no finalizers are used in this library
	label.Unref()
	window.SetDefaultSize(500, 500)
	window.Present()
}
```

Save this to a main.go and then build & run with

```bash
go run main.go
```

> **_NOTE:_**  You can also use `CGO_ENABLED=0` to build without cgo!

# Library loading
Because the GTK libs are loading at runtime (in `init`), we have to know where your libs are located.
The default configuration is a "just works" configuration, we hardcode some paths that are common.

However, for systems such as NixOS or distros that use other paths the following environment variables might help:

- `PUREGOTK_LIB_FOLDER`, set this to the root folder where all libs are stored e.g. `/some/path/`
- `PUREGOTK_LIBNAME_PATH` where `LIBNAME` is the name of the library, e.g. `PUREGOTK_GTK_PATH` for the file path to GTK e.g. `/some/path/libgtk-4.so`. You have to do this for all deps, e.g. cairo, pango, etc

See https://github.com/jwijenbergh/puregotk/blob/main/internal/core/core.go for exact implementation details.

Additionally we also have a fallback to `pkg-config`, but I would say only rely on this as a last effort due to the increased startup time.
When packaging code, always make sure that correct paths are used by e.g. using the aforementioned environment variables.

# Generating the library
This library is automatically generated by reading GIR files.

To generate the library, run:

```bash
./gen.sh
```

In the root of the project. This needs:

- Go >= 1.20
- [goimports](https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports)

# License

[MIT](./LICENSE)

# Acknowledgements
* [Purego](https://github.com/ebitengine/purego) and the ebitengine team for their great work
* [gotk4](https://github.com/diamondburned/gotk4) for some GIR type definitions
* [gtk](https://gitlab.gnome.org/gnome/gtk) of course

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