Iup Go Wrapper

go-iup is a Go wrapper around the Iup GUI toolkit. The project was started on April 27, 2011.

Changes in go-iup vs. Iup in C

Documentation is minimal with go-iup because Iup's documentation is very good and valid since go-iup strives for a 1-to-1 mapping. However, there are some general changes to better fit into the Go language.

1. Iup has been dropped from the function names. go-iup functions are already accessed by the iup package name. So, IupOpen becomes iup.Open(), IupVersion() becomes iup.Version(), etc...
2. IUP_ has been dropped from the constant names for the same reason as #1. Thus, IUP_IGNORE becomes iup.IGNORE, IUP_DEFAULT becomes iup.DEFAULT, etc...
3. Anything as of Iup 3.5 that has been marked as deprecated has not and will not be wrapped in go-iup. No sense in wrapping it and then next release removing it. Just don't even start with it.
4. The old ACTION name has been replaced by a SetCallback method in Iup. Thus, any widget that expects an ACTION name on control creation in Iup C does not in go-iup. For example, IupButton("Press Me", "PRESS_ME_ACTION") no longer takes the "PRESS_ME_ACTION" parameter.
5. All widgets can accept a variable number of optional parameters. These parameters, if a string, are considered attributes to be set on the newly created widget. If a valid Icallback type, then they are considered callbacks to be set on the newly created widget.

Callbacks, Actions ... Old and New

button = IupButton("Say Hello", "SAY_HELLO")
IupSetAttributes(button, "FLAT=YES,ALIGNMENT=ALEFT")
IupSetFunction("SAY_HELLO", printHello)

has been replaced with

button := iup.Button("Say Hello", 
    "FLAT=YES,ALIGNMENT=ALEFT",
    (iup.ActionFunc)(printHello))

The optional parameters can appear in any order. For example the following is the same as the prior:

button := iup.Button("Say Hello", 
    "FLAT=YES", 
    (iup.ActionFunc)(printHello)), 
    "ALIGNMENT=ALEFT")

Installing the Iup library

go-iup deals with three projects from Tecgraf:

• Iup - Cross platform native control GUI library
• Cd - Cross platform canvas drawing library
• Im - Cross platform image library

To use go-iup you must install all three libraries. Download the appropriate archive files from the Iup Download Tips page. You should then place the .a (library) files in your lib/ directory and .h (header) files in your include/ directory. If compiling on Windows, .dll (dynamically linked library) files in your %PATH%.

Building go-iup

$ git clone https://github.com/jcowgar/go-iup.git
$ cd go-iup
$ ./all.bash

Special notes for Windows

You should download the 'dllw4' variant of Iup. This is the dynamically linked version of the libraries for MinGW. For easy compliation you should have already installed a working version of MinGW and MSYS. Building will be the same as any other platform but started from the MSYS Bash shell.