alexflint/gallium

Gallium is a Go library that lets developers build desktop applications where the visible interface is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The underlying display engine is Chromium, the same browser core that powers Google Chrome, so any web page or web-based UI can be rendered inside a native application window. The idea is similar to Electron, which is a well-known tool in the JavaScript world, except that with Gallium the surrounding application logic is written in Go rather than JavaScript. The library handles the parts of a desktop application that go beyond a single web page: application menus (the bar at the top of the screen with File, Edit, and similar items), a status bar icon, desktop notifications, and a dock icon. Developers write Go code to control these native elements, while the actual UI content lives in HTML files loaded into a Chromium window. Gallium also lets you mix in C or Objective-C code when you need to call macOS-specific APIs directly, such as making a window semi-transparent. At the time this README was written, Gallium only ran on macOS. Windows and Linux support was listed as planned but not yet available. The project was also described as an early release, with most of its programming interfaces likely to change before reaching a stable 1.0 version. Installing Gallium requires a tool called git large file storage because the package bundles a 92 MB binary copy of the Chromium content module. Building a finished application requires an extra step to wrap the output into an app bundle, which is the standard format macOS expects for programs that have menus and dock icons. Running the executable directly without that bundle causes some native features to stop working. This project is aimed at Go developers who want to ship a desktop application with a web-based interface rather than writing a fully native UI from scratch. If you know Go and already build web UIs, Gallium offers a way to package that work as a standalone desktop program without switching to a different programming language.