Vecty lets you build responsive and dynamic web frontends in Go using WebAssembly, competing with modern web frameworks like React & VueJS.
Benefits
- Go developers can be competitive frontend developers.
- Share Go code between your frontend & backend.
- Reusability by sharing components via Go packages so that others can simply import them.
Goals
- Simple
- Designed from the ground up to be easily mastered by newcomers (like Go).
- Performant
- Efficient & understandable performance, small bundle sizes, same performance as raw JS/HTML/CSS.
- Composable
- Nest components to form your entire user interface, seperating them logically as you would any normal Go package.
- Designed for Go (implicit)
- Written from the ground up asking the question "What is the best way to solve this problem in Go?", not simply asking "How do we translate $POPULAR_LIBRARY to Go?"
Features
- Compiles to WebAssembly (via standard Go compiler).
- Small bundle sizes: 0.5 MB hello world (see section below).
- Fast expectation-based browser DOM diffing ('virtual DOM', but less resource usage).
Vecty vs. Vugu
If you're wondering if you should use Vecty or Vugu, consider reading this Twitter thread for advice from both myself and the creator of Vugu.
Current Status
Vecty is currently considered to be an experimental work-in-progress. Prior to widespread production use, we must meet our v1.0.0 milestone goals, which are being completed slowly and steadily as contributors have time (Vecty is over 4 years in the making!).
Early adopters may make use of it for real applications today as long as they are understanding and accepting of the fact that:
- APIs will change (maybe extensively).
- A number of important things are not ready:
- Extensive documentation, examples and tutorials
- URL-based component routing
- Ready-to-use component libraries (e.g. material UI)
- Server-side rendering
- And more, see milestone: v1.0.0
- The scope of Vecty is only ~80% defined currently.
- There are a number of important open issues.
For a list of projects currently using Vecty, see the doc/projects-using-vecty.md file.
Near-zero dependencies
Vecty has nearly zero dependencies, it only relies on reflect from the Go stdlib. Through this, it is able to produce the smallest bundle sizes for Go frontend applications out there, limited only by the Go compiler itself:
| Example binary | Compiler | uncompressed | gzip --best |
brotli |
|---|---|---|---|---|
hellovecty.wasm |
tinygo 0.14.0 |
252K | 97K | 81K |
hellovecty.wasm |
go 1.15 |
2.1M | 587K | 443K |
markdown.wasm |
go 1.15 |
3.6M | 1010K | 745K |
todomvc.wasm |
go 1.15 |
2.9M | 825K | 617K |
Note: Bundle sizes above do not scale linearly with more code/dependencies in your Vecty project. hellovecty is the smallest base-line bundle that the compiler can produce with just Vecty as a dependency, other examples above pull in more of the Go standard library and you would not e.g. have to pay that total cost again.
Community
- Join us in the #vecty channel on the Gophers Slack!
Changelog
See the doc/CHANGELOG.md file.